Marvel - Ultimate Alliance 2

Fusions are the reason this sequel exists. Hold the right trigger, pick a teammate, and two powers braid into one effect: Iceman freezing the stream of Human Torch's flame, Thor's hammer handed to someone with the arms to swing it. The game is built to make you stop mashing long enough to think about who is standing next to whom, and for a licensed brawler in 2009 that was a genuinely fresh demand.

The story leans on Marvel's Civil War, which means the roster eventually splits and you pick a side of the Superhuman Registration Act. It is a compressed, blunt version of the comic, and the dialogue choices scattered through it rarely change much beyond flavour. Still, there is some weight in watching a four-hero team you have been levelling together get torn in half, and the Nanite-driven back end of the plot gives the back half a proper villain instead of an endless parade of registered-hero scraps.

What the PS2 owner is playing is not the same build as the HD release. n-Space handled this version alongside the Wii and PSP ports, and it runs a tighter, more arcade-minded design: fewer simultaneous bodies on screen, simplified skill trees, environments that are more corridor than playground. Some of that is a loss. The destructible scenery and the crowded set pieces that gave the 360 version its scale are thinned out here, and the camera pulls in closer to hide it. What survives intact is the thing that mattered, the four-player couch co-op, drop-in and drop-out, which is where this whole series earned its keep.

It is a grind, and it does not pretend otherwise. You hammer through waves, pick up costume unlocks and stat boosts, and the combat depth tops out early once you find a Fusion pairing that clears rooms. Played solo it sags badly around the midpoint. Played with three other people on one sofa it becomes something else entirely, loud and stupid in the right way, with everyone shouting about whose turn it is to be Deadpool.

The first Ultimate Alliance is the better-balanced game and the more generous one, with a roster roughly twice this size. But Fusions are a real idea, cleanly executed, and no other Marvel game has done anything quite like them since. That counts for something on a console that saw more superhero tie-ins than it deserved.