Before I go too far, let me say this – I’m enjoying Marvel’s Avengers. It’s not a bad game. It’s decent. Everything about it is decent. Decent animations, skins, story, and so on. What’s weird and off-putting is wrapping all of that around a live-service engine.
I *almost* can’t blame Square-Enix for this. Having the excellent Spider-Man game on the PS4 before this came out is a killer. It’s a tough act to follow. Slick combat, great story, with fun collectibles filled with sly references to the comics, movies and even previous Spidey games. It is one of the few games I took the time to 100%. Marvel’s Avengers wasn’t designed to mimic that, but you can’t help comparing the two.
What’s Good
The story is a lot of fun! Very typical alternate universe sort of story, with the Avengers disbanding after failing to stop a cataclysmic event. Kamala Khan, who survived the event (A-Day) and was exposed to Terrigen, is using her new Inhuman powers to try and prove that the Avengers weren’t at fault. Pretty classic stuff.
I love the costumes for the most part (the original Captain America suit they have sucks), and they have a large variety to find and craft. They were obviously influenced by the movies for the visuals, but kept things just legally distinct enough.
The choice to have Kamala as the lead is inspired. Sandra Saad voices her well, and is joined by a cast of industry vets like Jennifer Hale, Nolan North, and Troy Baker. It is very much an MCU-inspired set of performances, but they handle it.
What’s Not
The combat is repetitive, and so are the enemies. This wouldn’t necessarily be a deal-breaker in a single player game where all you want is to get through the story, but they want us to keep playing new raids and content for years to come. Not sure it’s fun enough now for that to work. Currently I’ll probably pop back in when new characters release to give them a shot. That’ll be the window Crystal Dynamics has to make me a believer again.
Things are TOO balanced. Normally that wouldn’t be a bad thing, but we all know that fights with the Hulk should be far different than with, say, Black Widow. But since the multiplayer content has to work for everyone, an under-geared Hulk is going to get his ass beat, while Black Widow with killer gear has an easier time. That’s the nature of a live-service Destiny clone, but it feels weird attached to Marvel characters.
Conclusion
Marvel’s Avengers has a good enough main story to be worth playing, just not at full price. You can already score half price pretty easily (this Humble store link works as of now) and at least for now, there are still new characters and updated content coming. Let’s hope they can improve the game so it has signs of life outside of the main story. I’ll embed part 1 of my playthrough from Twitch below if you want to check it out. Excelsior!
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