Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 guide: Best heroes and team

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order is all about building a team — or ultimate alliance if you prefer — of Marvel heroes. The game has 36 playable heroes at launch, with more coming in DLC later this year. In the first few hours, you may find yourself racked with indecision over who you want to play. This guide will teach you what heroes you should grab early and stick with.

What heroes are best?

The short answer is the one you like the most, but the long answer is a bit more complicated.

Team Ninja/Nintendo via Polygon

Picking a hero

Although Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 has 36 heroes with unique attributes, there are also archetypes that characters fall into. For instance, Thor and Captain Marvel play fairly similarly, and Spider-Man, Miles Morales, and Spider Gwen have nearly identical combat styles. The key is to find a character whose archetype you like and who has the abilities you want to use.

Early recommendations

You’ll pick up a couple new heroes in every early chapter, with a whole heap of them showing up in Chapter 1. While we recommend trying out every character you get, we do have a couple early game superstars:

• Wolverine: Wolverine heals over time, so he’s the perfect guy to get you started as you test out new heroes.
• Scarlet Witch: Scarlet Witch eventually gains the ability to heal allies, which is very useful. Pick her up and invest some experience early.
• Venom: You’ll pick up Venom shortly after the first big batch, and he’s a great character to keep with you. He hits hard, and his first ability does some serious stagger damage to early bosses.

How should I build my team?

Team Ninja/Nintendo via Polygon

When it comes to building your crew, we have a few recommendations.

New member, new team

When you find a new hero out in the wild, they’ll always be appropriately leveled. Unless you’ve been playing a lot of Infinity challenges on the side, they’ll probably be higher leveled than your current squad.

One easy method to making sure you’re checking out every hero (and that you also have the most powerful squad you can) is to simply drag and drop each new character onto your roster as soon as you get them.

A permanently rotating crew will ensure that you’re always powerful and that the gameplay never gets boring.

The ringer method

Everyone has their favorite heroes in the Marvel universe, and there’s a good chance a few of them are in this game. If you want to play your favorites and check out new heroes as you get them, pick two ringers to keep with you at all times.

We kept Venom and Wolverine through the entire campaign. Not only did they earn tons of experience from being with us all the time, but we also ensured that we always had the Anti-Hero bonus.

We like this method because it keeps your roster somewhat familiar while offering the flexibility of trying new heroes (which is 2% to Strength with two anti-heroes).

Whoever you want

Like we said in our beginners guide, there isn’t a correct team to play in Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3. Pick who you want and play them as long as you want to play them.

The only problem with this method is that you’ll end up with a lot of heroes with lower levels. Use your XP Cubes to keep your heroes in tip-top shape, and you’ll do just fine against the children of Thanos.