What can i say? When it comes to Marvel characters, i’m a fan. It’s always good to see someone get it right, like the Iron Man movie and Hulk vs Wolverine cartoon to name a couple of recent successes.

The X-Men Legends series (which became the Marvel Ultimate Alliance series) has always been a treat for us Marvel readers. Even though the gameplay can get a bit mashy/sloppy, the extensive variety of team combinations and powers is easily worth the price of admission, not to mention their excellent storytelling and dialogue. With the September 15th release date right around the corner, i decided to take a closer look at the trailers for potential combo ideas. Here’s what i came up with:

1) What’s the most damage you can do to one guy? Usually in these games enemies stop registering damage once they die, and it’s a lot harder to perform lengthy sequences on bosses because they have hyper armor. My bet is on the fusion between Thor and Mr. Fantastic. It looks like a whirlwind launcher followed by one power slam, which will probably cause a lot more pain to a single target than the dispersion powers such as the fusion between Iron Man and Songbird. Plus Mr. Fantastic was an absolute monster in MUA1 – it’s always the characters you never suspect who end up dealing the most damage.

2) Iceman looks to be one of the more interesting setup characters in the game. His vignette trailer shows him freezing opponents, which can enable some nasty combos, especially if it works after a launcher. It’ll be interesting to freeze grunts and have Juggernaut run through them. If that prevents them from getting knocked away, maybe Juggernaut can rapidly stack up crazy amounts of damage.

3) Most of the fusion powers seem to be maneuverable, particularly the tornado thing which gets pimped out a lot, apparently. Storm and Human Torch get to make a flame spiral, Thor and Deadpool create a “grenado,” Jean Grey and Green Goblin do the same, and so on. It’s a safe bet that any of these tornado creators can be paired with any of the tornado enhancers to create the same effect. But is it possible to create a double tornado by combining two tornado casters?! Also, what happens if you create a tornado with let’s say Thor and Human Torch, then throw Captain America’s shield into it? Even if it normally passes right through, it should be possible to manually spin the shield in the opposite direction of the tornado to generate quite a buff damage loop.

4) Gambit has a move where he throws roughly fifteen charged cards straight up, then walks away as they fall. Hopefully the walking away part was done manually, because it would be a lot less useful if it always has that much recovery time. It’s actually hilarious in the trailer because two of the enemy soldiers in the corner survive the explosion and continue firing at Gambit’s back. But anyway, this seems like a cool power to combine with any other attack. I’d go for the Juggernaut+Storm fusion of throwing a lightning-charged boulder at someone. That way you get three different types of damage: Energy, Physical, and Lightning.

5) Of course the most important thing to figure out is the game engine’s cancelation flowchart. For example, are melee attacks (especially launchers) cancelable into powers? Are powers cancelable into fusion moves? Does anyone have a quick dash or teleport that can be used to cancel other attacks? Does anyone have an attack which is capable of harming team members? Needless to say, if that’s possible then you can create all kinds of advanced combos such as having Gambit throw hundreds of cards into the air by repeatedly interrupting his cooldown animation right after he releases them. Any of these questions can lead to a whole host of creative combos. Depending how fast Deadpool’s teleport recovers, we might even see some awesome melee attack juggles.

Well, that’s all i’ve got for now. Let’s hope this game delivers! Fingers crossed.