Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2

There's none of that for the second go around. The exotic varied locations are replaced by urban streets and samey metal corridors, with only a brief excursion to Black Panther's African kingdom of Wakanda to remind you that there's more to Marvel's world than grey concrete and brown metal. The boss encounters are all virtually identical in construction, many are repeated several times for no good reason and none of your foes are particularly memorable or carry much cult appeal, unless you've been praying for Grim Reaper or Diamondback to finally get their moment in the spotlight. As far as the source material is concerned, there's a persistent sense that the game is stuck making sandwiches with the leftovers from the previous game's banquet.

More worrying, this diminished scale has even slipped under the covers and gnawed away at the fundamentals. For example, you can no longer set the combat stance of your allies - they simply dash around hitting stuff at random. You even have less control over customising each hero's abilities. In the last game each character had several alternate costumes, each of which had its own trio of status effects that could be levelled up, offering another layer of depth to your squad choices. Now you get just one alternate costume, and it's purely cosmetic. The only modifiers you get are Boost medals, which are awarded for specific tasks or found in the levels, but you can only have three of these active at any time, and they apply to the whole team. You can't even choose which powers to assign to the face buttons.

For my second playthrough I eventually stopped paying attention to the RPG stuff and let the game auto-spend my XP, even though I'd obsessed over every point spent in the first Ultimate Alliance, and it never felt like I was missing out. For a series which always had a fairly strong RPG heritage, this is pathetically shallow and a major step backwards. It's also phenomenally easy. Several characters are wildly unbalanced in terms of their power - Thor especially - and once unlocked you can pretty much blitz the game with the same two attacks over and over. This is especially true of Legend mode, which unlocks when you complete the game. By that point your characters should be pretty much untouchable, so the toughest difficulty is, rather ludicrously, noticeably easier than playing on Normal.

Continuing the grumble parade, online co-op relies on an off-putting opaque system that segregates players based on their single-player save files, and penalises them with zero experience points if they join a game where their story progress doesn't match up. Lobby drop-outs are common, and that's if you're lucky enough to find a game that matches your requirements in the first place. The basic concept of the game makes it the perfect candidate for simple fuss-free drop-in multiplayer, but this mangled lobby and matchmaking system make Fable II's fumbling efforts look like the height of sophisticated network play.