It took Marvel’s video games a few more years than its movies to become consistently good, but now, that threshold has been reached. With Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order and Iron Man VR coming out soon, more and more Marvel games are allowing players the chance to live in the shoes of their favorite heroes and waste the hours away with some of the most delightful power fantasies the medium can offer.
So, before so many new Marvel games come out that this list is rendered obsolete, here are the 10 best video games so far based on Marvel properties, and the best ways to prepare for the onslaught of great titles to come.
Deadpool (X360, PS3, PC)
It’s hard not to have nostalgia goggles on when thinking about 2013’s Deadpool, partially because it had the irreverent ridiculousness that was nowhere near as tired as it is now. The out-of-print brawler is nothing special on a gameplay or even story level, but its bright and zany attitude is perfect for bringing back memories of better games and simpler times.
It’s not a glowing recommendation, and it’s not a glowing game, but the idea of it being permanently pulled from both physical and virtual stores is a sad thought.
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 (X360, PS3)
Like almost every other Marvel game, Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 is heavily indebted to the #2 game on this list, almost as much as it’s indebted to its predecessor. The biggest flaw in Ultimate Alliance 2 is that aside from extra characters and shinier visuals, it’s nearly identical to the original game; while that demands a lower spot on a top 10 list, it’s still a perfect game for fans of the first that want another ride. Also, you can play as the Green Goblin, which is an absurd amount of fun.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine - Uncaged Edition (X360, PS3)
How can one of the worst Marvel films become one of the best Marvel games? By coming out of the cage, and it is doing far better than fine. The Uncaged Edition of X-Men Origins: Wolverine is little more than a few hours of pure Wolverine carnage, making full use of its M rating, and the world is all the better for it.
It’s not good enough to make the film’s existence worthwhile, but it does have the starkest difference between source and game quality of any of the 10 games on this list, and that counts for something.
LEGO Marvel Super Heroes (X360, PS3, PC, WiiU)
While it’s tempting to put LEGO The Avengers or LEGO Marvel Super Heroes 2 on here either alongside or instead of the first LEGO Marvel Super Heroes, the original is still the most notable. It’s just what the title advertises, a LEGO game with Marvel characters in it, and as a replication of the tried and true LEGO formula, it’s stellar.
It also has a level of genuine passion and heart that its two successors never truly managed to pick up on, making up for its lesser roster with a tighter and more polished family-friendly experience.
The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction (XBOX, PS2, GCUBE)
The thing about Marvel video games is that almost all of them are some form of beat-‘em-up because that’s the best way to translate the hectic violence of the comic panels. That said, it’s hard to criticize The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction for its shoddy visuals and half-baked story when the carnage is this exciting.
While studio Radical Entertainment outshone themselves a few years later with Prototype, they still made the best Hulk game possible. Ultimate Destruction is willfully stupid and bombastic in a way only a Hulk game could be.
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance (XBOX, PS2, PC)
About as perfect as an update of arcade co-op brawlers could be, Marvel Ultimate Alliance has an awful box art, a nonsense story, and so many licensed characters shoved into one product that it’s bursting…and yet, it’s a lean, mean fighting machine that sticks the landing.
Couch co-op is a tricky thing to pull off, and few do it as well as Marvel Ultimate Alliance, even if it means the camera is confused at best and erratic at worst. And as superhero content gets more and more serious, it’s nice to play a game where every single frame is a splash page.
Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes (DREAMCAST)
The most polished of the Marvel vs. Capcom series, from a time when fighting games finally started to balance themselves and create an endlessly replayable experience, Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes embraced its pixels when many of its contemporaries were going 3D.
As such, it’s one of the few fighting games from the early 2000s that looks nearly as good now as it did back then, remembered even more fondly after seeing where the franchise has stumbled in its most recent iterations.
Spider-Man 2 (XBOX, PS2, GCUBE)
The most ubiquitous game on this list, nearly everyone who was a kid when the Spider-Man 2 game came out raved about how great it felt to swing around the PS2-era polygonal New York.
One of the first and few great movie tie-in games, Spider-Man 2 set a standard for a different kind of superhero game that wasn’t matched or overtaken for fourteen years, showing how ahead-of-its-time and cleverly put together it was. That you can get around 50 hours of exhilaration crammed onto a GameCube disk is still difficult to believe.
X-Men (ARCADE)
As stand-up arcade machines go the way of pinball tables, where only the most notable and influential are allowed to be remembered, it’s tempting to skip over any of the many old school beat-‘em-ups that aren’t Streets of Rage or Double Dragon. And while those games are great, none of them have the pure multiplayer bliss of the X-Men arcade cabinet.
With sparser backdrops and a heftier focus on the differences between playable characters, X-Men might be one of the best cabinet games around, and finding one in the wild has always resulted in me making friends as we took on Magneto together. Unless they also wanted to play as Cyclops. I’m always Cyclops.
Marvel's Spider-Man (PS4)
It had to be this, didn’t it? Marvel’s Spider-Man does have a luxury no other game on this list has; it’s the newest game here and has the benefit of the most powerful hardware and specs to date.
That doesn’t take away the magic of the craftsmanship however, by refining the Spider-Man 2 web-swinging mechanic and building one of the best Spidey stories in any medium, Spider-Man is a game so effortlessly entertaining that it doesn’t need its characters and references to shine. But it does have those characters and references, so one of the best games of this console generation becomes the best Marvel game, and the best superhero game, of all time.