The eagerly anticipated Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 debuted mid-September with a seemingly large roster of 24 playable characters and some of the planned DLC has already surfaced online.

The first new character confirmed downloadable (through a hefty price no doubt), is Carnage, a good friend of Spider-Man and Venom.

While 24 characters may seem like a lot, it wasn't, and it still felt lacking in that department. This was likely due to the fact that MUA2 featured practically no RPG elements and represented an overly stripped down and simplified button-mash RPG, adding improved graphics but taking away the functionality we saw with X-Men Legends 2. This made the characters become a bit boring very quick and made players strive for more.

In this fourth game of the series of Marvel-based 4 player RPGs, each character was given only 4 powers, the least we've seen from all of the installments in the series. Many of the powers were nearly identical to a few other powers and the fusion attacks were repeated for many of the pairings of characters.

Where the previous game went wrong (Marvel Ultimate Alliance) in only allowing you to have one piece of equipment instead of 3 like in X-Men Legends 2, this game gives you none. Also, instead of letting you customize one of your four costumes, you get none of that and only one extra costume per character.

Adding to the frustration of not being able to do much with your character is yet another deficit in not allowing you to grow your skills or attributes. You only get one point to put in one of your four powers, continuously limited by the level you're at to prevent actual development of one power over the three others. I can go on and on but I'm sure you get to the point.

Did I mention there's no inventory system, or money to buy/sell stuff?

I'd like to see more from the next installment, including cutscenes without missing sound effects. The gameplay graphics were big step forward but the heroes need to be able to do more and the players need to be able to do a ton more in terms of the Role Playing and upgrading elements.

Again, the industry is lacking in 4-player local co-op games so we must accept the few we do get.

What do you think of Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2: Fusion and what characters do you want to see added?