Marvel's Avengers Review

Like heroes, every game has to start somewhere, and Marvel’s Avengers is a game that did not start somewhere good. The superhero RPG-esque adventure was certainly an enjoyable experience for a short while, but the game simply didn’t have nearly enough content or variety at launch to be worth the rather high price tag, with a number of technical issues on top. Live-service games need to have a strong beginning, a running start, to keep an active player base and then maintain that momentum with consistent content drops that add replayability. Avengers had a fun, average-sized story campaign and a small handful of bonus post-game missions, but it struggled to keep a grip on the initial player count, myself included. A number of extra playable characters and events added later on did help the game’s survivability, and some of the planned additions seem to give the game a moderately brighter future. But the future isn’t right now - and right now, these Avengers may not be worth assembling.

The story campaign of the game was, for me, by far it’s biggest strength. It’s a simple story of the good guys getting beaten and an unlikely young hero fighting to reunite them against a threat that has risen in their absence, but it’s told extremely well and kept me engaged from start to finish (even despite the similar story beats to Avengers: Endgame). The main protagonist, a teenage girl named Kamala Khan (otherwise known as Ms. Marvel) serves as an excellent mirror to the audience - she’s a massive fangirl of the Avengers, and her excitement at getting to meet them in person and fight alongside them was matched by my own. Most impressively, the developers took MODOK, perhaps one of the most unthreatening, silly-looking comic villains, and made his transformation from normal scientist to unhinged living bobblehead believable and genuinely intimidating. Much like in the comics, the “Inhumans” - people exposed to Terrigen, which causes them to develop frightening superpowers and are seen as dangerous freaks by the public - present a fairly obvious parallel to real-world forms of discrimination such as racism, xenophobia, homophobia and so on. Kamala herself is an Inhuman, and the fear she feels that she might accidentally “out” herself to people that might not be friendly to those like her, and the anger she feels towards the AIM organisation treating her people as monsters and less than human, both feel very real. Many people playing this game may relate to having to hide their true self for fear of being hated and ostracised. The joy and relief she feels upon meeting a hidden group of Inhumans known as the Resistance that are fighting for their rights is heartwarming, and every fight to finally put a stop to AIM is incredibly cathartic.

I found myself having the most fun in this game during the story campaign. The more linear levels with greater focus on platforming and puzzles alongside combat were satisfying and incredibly enjoyable, as well as the character interactions and engagement with the story. Once the campaign and the various side missions are finished, however, it starts to get very grindy and repetitive when you’re just playing the same missions over and over to level up your characters. At least the hub levels you visit between missions are full of fun little interactions and easter eggs to find. Despite the repetitive postgame missions, it is fun to experiment with the different abilities and movesets you unlock over time. My favourite hero to play was Kamala, who can quickly turn into a walking cyclone of flying fists that send enemies all around you across the map. Or, if you’re feeling a little less dramatic, simply pushing the tougher enemies off cliffs with one of Kamala’s abilities is hilariously anti-climactic. The bosses are, unfortunately, immune to such attacks, so you’ll need to fight them the hard way. Besides the final boss, the boss fights are one of the game’s biggest weaknesses - from the 80+ year history of the Marvel comics, you’d think there were plenty of villains to pit against the heroes. Instead, the developers opted to use just two villains, Taskmaster and Abomination, alongside a handful of fairly generic giant mechs, and make the player fight them over and over ad nauseam.

The game’s combat is engaging and requires quick thinking and quicker reflexes. I’m admittedly not that great at utilising the dodge mechanics, but chaining combos of attacks while ducking and weaving around enemies can be quite satisfying. Building up these combos are also encouraged by each character possessing unique “intrinsic” abilities that are charged up by dealing enough damage without getting hit. The game has plenty of gameplay customisation, with dozens of different unlockable skills and various kinds of equipment that make it easy and fun to create your own playstyle. Outside of combat, however, I felt that the mobility side of the controls could often get frustratingly clunky, especially in the larger open-world areas where objectives can be hundreds of metres apart. Leaping around as the Hulk or flying as Iron Man and Thor is either somewhat boring or extremely janky, with practically no in-between. Meanwhile, more grounded characters such as Kamala or Black Widow just have to sprint everywhere, which can cause the gameplay to become annoyingly slow.

The graphics of the game are fairly decent; the environments are almost photorealistic and some areas of the story campaign look very pretty. Kamala’s night-time escape from AIM troops across the rooftops and through the sewers of New Jersey is an exhilarating race for survival, made all the more nerve-wracking by the eerie spotlights shining into the sewers, revealing troops hidden in the shadows. The lighting design of the game provides an excellent layer of atmosphere to the story. The characters themselves are well-designed - they somewhat resemble the MCU version of the Avengers, making them easily recognisable to newer Marvel fans, but simultaneously have distinct enough designs to show that they aren’t the same Avengers we’ve seen in the films. Although, if you prefer the movie looks, each character has a skin you can buy that gives them an outfit picked directly from the MCU. Aside from those, however, most of the unlockable skins feel somewhat lazily-designed in my opinion, with most of them being simple recolours. On the villainous side, Taskmaster’s design isn’t quite as threatening as in the comics or in Insomniac Games’ Spider-Man games, resembling more of a half-decent Halloween costume than an actual supervillain outfit. On the other hand, the main antagonist, MODOK, looks extremely badass and intimidating - a genuinely remarkable accomplishment considering the character’s extremely silly appearance in the comics. The final battle against MODOK is an incredibly cinematic and heart-racing battle, and truly feels like something out of the films.

The game’s sound design is adequate enough. While it isn’t anything groundbreaking or particularly memorable, there isn’t anything particularly wrong with it either. The enemies don’t give much warning of their attacks, requiring the player to pay attention to visual cues on the HUD to know when to dodge and counter-attack. The weapons, such as Thor’s hammer Mjolnir or Iron Man’s repulsor blasts, have decent audio design, giving them a feeling of weight and impact that feels immersive. The voice acting in the game is good, especially Kamala’s as the main protagonist and source of much of the story’s emotion; she really made me empathise with her story and experiences and the feeling in her voice was a big part of that. The Avengers’ voice actors do an impressive job of making the characters feel familiar to MCU fans while still giving them a unique enough sound to make them feel like new interpretations of the characters. Some of the supporting characters tend to talk a bit too much in my opinion, especially JARVIS, the game’s mission control. Expect to hear his voice remind you of your objective every few seconds, regardless of how far away it is or even if you’re in the middle of doing the objective.

One of the game’s major weak points, in my opinion, is the replayability. The game receives new content every so often, including new playable heroes accompanied by their own unique, smaller story campaigns. But once you’ve finished playing through the shorter stories, you’re left with characters that need levelling up and several daily challenges to complete. It’s at this point that most of the game’s playtime begins - as does the tedious and increasingly boring part. To level up your heroes and complete the challenges, all you really can do is repeat the same old missions over and over to grind out XP and progress the often-lengthy challenges. The challenges alone can be rather tedious, but an added level of difficulty comes with the AI-controlled companion heroes that fight by your side in each mission. If you need to defeat a specific amount of a specific enemy, be prepared to race your companions for the killing blow since their enemy kills do not count for challenge progression - and they tend to be VERY aggressive. The game also gives the player a series of daily and weekly challenges, which generally consist of fighting a certain number of the same enemies and defeating the same rotation of four bosses every few days, which gets old fast. Granted, the combat is fun and the challenges are an excuse to keep playing between content drops (which tend to be rather far apart), but it quickly becomes a test of how long you’re willing to do the same missions and fights before you get bored and leave the game alone until the next hero campaign is added.

Marvel’s Avengers had an extremely rough start, and the rapidly dropping player base did not help the game’s struggle to improve its’ survivability. The game tells a fun and engaging story with some excellent character development, and initially, it is a genuinely fun game to play. But in live-service games, the main story campaign is merely a way to bring the player in and hopefully keep them around for the post-game content. When the only content outside of the story campaign is an annoyingly repetitive handful of missions and an endless list of grindy, often boring and (again) repetitive challenges, the player is hardly to blame if they decide to just abandon the game after the credits roll. That said, the small batches of content drops are generally just as well-made as the main story campaign, and there’s nothing wrong with simply picking the game up to play through the new extra stories and mess around with the new heroes before leaving it alone for a while again. Once again, every game needs to start somewhere - and plenty of superheroes have had their rough origin stories before they really take off. The engaging story and initial fun gameplay is a better start than plenty of other games have had - but until this game truly gains the strength it needs to keep its’ players returning, I’d recommend giving it a little more time to assemble itself a little better. 6.5/10.