Marvel Alliance Tactics

Welcome to my review of Marvel Alliance Tactics!
This is the first post that I made to this blog and Marvel Alliance Tatics is debuting it!

Introduction

I think this quote does an pretty good job about describing what is this game about:

Marvel Avengers Alliance Tactics is a 3D turn-based tactical RPG game (like XCOM, Tactics Ogre) with a World Map that connects base building and PVP features (like War Commander).

I grabbed it from this other blog.
I've being a fan of Marvel comics since childhood, so playing around a video game that involves the Marvel universe character is always fun. And after Disney bought the copyrights, things got really interesting, specially with the new movies.
And playing strategy games for me is always cool, so it might be a great chance to have fun with both, doesn't it?
But this game, oh well... I'm really disappointed. Let's see why.

What is annoying

No documentation

Documentation is almost none. It may be useless if you just playing around a few minutes a week, but if you want to understand better what happens between an upgrade or other, you're lost. There are other annoyances in the game that I mentioning in the rest of this post that will make you wonder "a wiki would solve this thing".

"Wizard-like" tutorial

The game tutorial sucks big time: it forces you to use it: there is no way to get out and it's difficult to change game settings as well. See "Why 3D?".

Why 3D?

The choice for creating a game 3D is almost default these days. It seems to be 3D is the sexiest thing about video games nowadays.
But what a minute: isn't this game to play from Facebook, over the Internet? Well, that means that if your Internet connection sucks, game experience will suck as well!
I have no problem with 3D, it has it's place. And definitely is not here.
This is a game about Marvel Comics. It may be a surprise for some, but most Marvel Comics are not 3D. And it's supposed that Marvel Alliance Tactics will be played by the comics fans! Also, considering that this game is translated to other languages besides English, it's not a clever assumption that everybody got a nice Internet connection.
Sure, you can set the game graphics to a minimum, turned off sounds effects and music, but that's not easy at the beginning of the game. See "Wizard-like" tutorial.
And, after all, the 3D with low graphics just sucks on the eyes. It would be far better to get nice animations in 2D (hey, Mike Deodato's work would rock here!).

Bad translation to Brazilian Portuguese

The game is badly translated for Brazilian Portuguese players. Don't know about Spanish although. It might be better than Brazilian Portuguese because some translations are actually in Spanish, so I think it just stayed there because of it's "coolness". It might be also a surprise for some morons, but in Brazil Spanish is not the official language.

"La garantia soy yo" as said by the Brazilian Portuguese translator hired by Playdom

Useless items upgrades

That's messy. Some skills and weapons don't have a decent explanation why you should buy the upgrade. Let's see some examples:

Teleport Self upgrade explanation

This example is a good example. By examining the screen shot, can you tell if the upgrade is worth paying for? This seems to apply to all defensive items upgrades as well:

Guard upgrade explanation

Balance upgrade explanation

In the other hand, action items upgrade are better explained:

Roundhouse upgrade - Chuck Norris would be mad if he sees the price of it

I just quit upgrading the defensive items. So far, so good. But, being a curious guy, I decided to ask to the good people at Playdom what is what:

Support given by a disciple of BOFH

Oh boy...
And don't forget: if a item doesn't have a decent explanation of what it does, don't bother buying it because it will do nothing at all.

Base upgrades are useless

Base upgrades are just a lame excuse to make you buy gold... or expend several hours farming for silver. After upgrading some times the vault, you might question yourself "why the hell the vault have now all those cannons that actually are not used at all"?
And... there is no answer for that. Attacking a level 1 vault is the same thing than attack a level 8. The difference is with the guards that are inside the vault. Oh boy, I really miss that part of building walls in Age of Empires...
Let's see some lame examples of what are you paying for:

Level 1 Jet upgrade dialog

You may think "oh, I upgrade my jet and something good happens!". Surprise! After upgrading the Jet you find out that will have to still hire agents to pilot it... with gold! You have to expend 8 pieces of gold to replace your previous crew to Jet level 2. I wonder what happened to the old crew... maybe all of them were fired? Besides that, you don't have the slightest idea what you get before buying a new Jet.

Command center upgrade explanation

In other words "you will need to upgrade the Command Center just to be able to do the other upgrades". Nothing chances at all at the Command Center. It's the same thing it was before the upgrade.

Iso-8 Refinery window

The Iso-8 Refinery is upgraded to allow harvesting Iso-8 faster. The capacity is also expanded. Or not?
It seems really stupid to have a production of 1920 that stops producing after 960 because someone needs to click the COLLECT button. Hope your have insomnia.
Don't even dream about upgrading the Quinjets hangar: you don't want to buy a new one. Do you know what you got if you do? A new Quinjet... but wait, you can't deploy two squads of heroes in the same mission. You also cannot execute two attacks simultaneously. And considering that you won't get any advice when your base is being attacked, WTF, for what this thing is good for?

Barracks is useless

What are barracks good for? The higher level you have for it, more people will be able to join your team.
But unless you are far above level 60 as commander, or have a lot of good to expend, well, the barracks are useless. Getting new characters is an expensive process. Buying ordinary Shield agent is just stupid, since they are much weaker than the weakest hero/villain you can buy.

Gold is your new god

Anything really cool (items and hero skills included) that you could purchase in this game is based on gold. The only ways to have gold are:

1. Buy it with real money. Now, come on: is it 500 pieces of gold worth of U$100?
2. Gain new levels as commander. A level up means you get a single piece of gold.

Some items doesn't costs gold directly, but are very expensive. For example, a new Quinjet costs 100,000 pieces of silver. Just for comparison, three minutes of acquiring silver with the most basic Jet gives you 30 pieces of silver.
And before I forget, a new "feature" was recently configured to the game to SPAM you about the new features of the game (all of them available with gold that you can buy) in the beginning of the game. You can close the window, but boy... after the fifth time it gets boring.

This annoyance completely justifies the next one.

Bullying is for everybody

Well, considering that gold is expensive and getting silver is hard, how do you accomplish getting resources quickly?
You can accomplish missions, but some of then doesn't always gives silver. You can get some higher amounts from the "roulette" that appears after completing some missions, but hey... if I like gambling I would not play a strategy game,right?
The answer is to attack other players. Yeah, the PVP mode could be translated to "bullying mode".
When you start playing, you got a shield protecting your base. As long you don't attack anyone, no one can attack your base. But this "free shield" last only for some days (5, if I remember). After that, you can be attacked by anyone. That means a level 1 player or a level 345366!!!
Not very cool if somebody keep hitting your base and destroying it. They will get a percentage of your earnings (in Iso-8 and silver) and you will have to wait some minutes to rebuild the base and "release" your team from the collapsed buildings.
Another problem is that getting your based defended just sucks. Even if you're on-line when being hit, there is not way you can control your characters against the invader. Yeah, the game AI is not that smart, I tell you.
Of course, you can get a new shield protecting you. Just buy it with gold. Depending on how much gold you expend you will get a new shield lasting for a couple of days.

Lame story

Well, the game story is not that good if you asked me. It is a bit messy have thousands of alternative Earth's trying to destroy your planet. The plot is just not that elaborated.

Bugs

Nowadays bugs are common in video games. Software programming is quite complex in this area and shipping must be done following a schedule.
Unfortunately, this games has some serious bugs. Sometimes the characters loses animation during battles, gaining a "sliding" movement. Sometimes the game completely crashes my Adobe Flash plug-in on Firefox. Or freeze it. Anyway, the solution is to close the browser and go back again.

Now and then I got invisible obstacles in some scenarios (most of them in some sort of jungle). You can't go cross the obstacle or attack from it, specially with attacks that involves area or a single straight line to hit several enemies.
And there is also that missing item description:

And last, but not least, let's talk about memory usage of the game: when you start playing, you will get something around 700MB of memory. After running the game for sometime like an hour, you will get something like this:

Don't know you, but I see a memory leak problem too, because I already saw it going to 2GB!
And there are many, many other bugs. Playdom even holds a list of the known bugs that they never fix. Iron Fist, for example, has a skill to recover energy for free. It's description says that occasionally he can heal other characters too. I never saw that happening. Besides, most of the time he uses the skills to heal energy when he doesn't need to. Other times, he uses the heal skill to attack enemies (doing damage in the processes) and other times the uses the attack to heal himself!

Why Flash anyway?

If you're technical inclined (I am) you may ask yourself why the insistence in using Flash anyway for on-line games. Flash is proprietary. This means that you might not have it available in your platform (I also use Linux).
The game is too heavy to download and run, even if your Internet connection is not that bad.
What about using HTML5? Or even Java (don't laugh, one could use Java Web Start).

What is cool anyway?

It's a Marvel game, with all the good characters you like it.
The strategy is quite simple, but really addictive. You just want to do that next stuff to complete something. It never ends.