Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3’s Inhumans Level Is Just Sad

Most of Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3’s story chapters are lengthy affairs filled with enemies to fight, puzzles to solve, characters to recruit, and multiple boss battles. Chapter seven, set in the moon-based Inhuman city of Attilan, is a ten-minute trip to the most boring place in the Marvel universe.

Of all of Marvel’s properties, the Inhumans have had the hardest time breaking out of comic books into more mainstream media. The Inhumans movie was announced in 2014, then canned. It became a 2017 television series, which was laughably bad. The only time the Inhumans have been entertaining outside of comics is in ABC’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. series, and that’s because the show never went Attilan to hang out with the Inhuman royal family.

Chapter seven of Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 sees our assembled heroes doing just that: stopping by Attilan to hang out with the Inhuman royal family. At the urging of Crystal, an Inhuman who joins the team earlier in the game, the alliance seeks Attilan’s aid in protecting the Infinity Stones from Thanos’ Black Order. Speaking for King Black Bolt, whose voice can shatter mountains, Queen Medusa tells Crystal that the Inhumans live on the moon in order to stay out of human affairs and they’ve no plans to change that now.

Fortunately for our heroes, villains attack. Which villains? Why, the only real villain the Inhumans have, Black Bolt’s brother, Maximus. Ever jealous of his brother’s power and ever hungry for the throne, Maximus chooses the exact moment a cadre of the universe’s greatest superheroes show up in order to stage a coup.

To back up and provide some context, the Inhumans are an ancient race of super-powered humans created by Kree scientists to use as soldiers in the ongoing conflict between the Kree and the Skrull. After the Kree discovered a prophecy that stated the Inhumans would be the downfall of their empire, they left to the Inhumans to fend for themselves on Earth. Young Inhumans gain their powers through exposure to something called terrigen mist, though in rare cases the terrigenesis process does not result in powers. Maximus is one of those rare cases, and it’s made him a real dick.

The entire chapter involves three battles against Maximus’ Alpha Primitives troops, who are as generic as lackies can be, followed by a battle against the man himself. It’s not a boring boss battle, as one might expect when pitting powerful heroes against a guy with a gun. Maximus has robot drones that fire powerful beam attacks. A guest character, whom I will not name for spoiler reasons, joins the battle, creating shields that players can hide under to avoid damage.

But that’s it, really. The entire chapter spans all of three rooms, so there’s no exploring to do. No new characters join the alliance. The Inhumans don’t change their minds and decide to help. Instead, the group receives a distress call from the Winter Soldier and rush off to Wakanda, kicking off a much lengthier and more interesting chapter.

Marvel’s been trying to make the Inhumans a thing for the past decade, mainly to fill the role of mutated humans with powers, since Fox had the film and movie rights to the X-Men. Now that Disney owns Fox, Marvel could just focus on the entertaining mutants and stop shoehorning the boring Inhumans into otherwise exciting video games. I guess someone felt the need to give it one last shot, though. Too bad it still didn’t work.

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