Game Review - Marvel's Avengers

Game Review: Marvel's Avengers by Crystal Dynamics
Score: +9/-7

By now you've probably heard that Marvel's Avengers is basically kaput. Development and support will end but the servers will remain alive for indefinite play. It is at a stupidly huge 85% discount on Steam now, an absolute steal -- if you focus on this as a single player game.

Assemble your team of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, embrace your powers, and live your Super Hero dreams.

Marvel’s Avengers is an epic, third-person, action-adventure game that combines an original, cinematic story with single-player and co-operative gameplay. Assemble into a team of up to four players online, master extraordinary abilities, customize an expansive roster of Heroes, and defend the Earth from escalating threats.

Foremost, Marvel's Avengers is a superhero game, and all things considered, it fulfills that basic criteria very well. It's from Crystal Dynamics, where we've come to expect high quality visuals and exhilarating action which we've seen in their previous titles such as Tomb Raider -- and Marvel's Avengers does not disappoint.

So certainly at 85%, it's worth picking up. Even at 50% it would have been a decent buy for just the single player experience. There were issues with buggy multiplayer and what to do after the story content, so the strength of Marvel's Avengers is really just as a SINGLE PLAYER GAME and for the main Operations only.

If Marvel's Avengers hadn't tried to be a multiplayer game, it would have done much better -- certainly sold for more money instead of constantly deeply discounted, and avoided complaints that only exist in the multiplayer/games-as-a-service genre.

In comparison, Hogwarts Legacy chose the right path and despite complaints that it wasn't multiplayer, they didn't try to force it to be multiplayer and instead focussed on their strengths in delivering a fantastic story experience.

Marvel's Avengers is overall an excellent story and gameplay experience. But in the end that got overshadowed by other issues.

There's a lot of good and bad here and we'll go through it in our review, but most certainly we do not feel that this game really deserved to die like this. Marvel Ultimate Alliance was a landmark game of it's time with a lot of similarities -- so much that I wondered why people didn't compare the two more often. Players loved it because it delivered a superhero experience in story and combat. Yet somehow Marvel's Avengers, upgraded to modern visuals, fell short of expectation. Of course a buggy release didn't help, and first impressions are hard to overcome.

• +1 Free high-quality content.
• Originally you bought the base game, then you got additional expansions for free that added new characters and new story arcs.
• -1 The story in the first operation/campaign, Reassemble, is awful.
• As an introduction to Marvel's Avengers, just the story is a turn-off, but if you're used to Hollywood Marvel storytelling, it doesn't fall far short of that standard to be honest.
• For the most part what you can expect is larger-than-life action, plot twists, and attempts at emotional beats -- but too often at the expense of plausibility, which results in plot holes the Hulk could walk through without bumping into anything.
• +1 Nevertheless the action in the various chapters of the campaign are excellent.
• The locations are varied and well-crafted.
• You really zoom in on each hero, and they take time to let you try to get into character, walking you through doing various non-combat things while they have their little soliloquies.
• +1 The major boss fights -- Epic. The final mission -- Epic. The final boss fight -- Epic. Any one of them makes this title worthwhile, and we haven't even talked about the other Operations, just the very first one.
• -1 The rest of the game generally recycles missions into story arcs and feels like grind.
• Some of the mission chains even require a fairly high gear score, so you're in for a lot of grind to collect loot boxes until your gear score is high enough. And you have to do that for each character you might want to play because each character has their own set of gear.
• The three major Operations you get after Reassemble -- Taking AIM, Future Imperfect, and War for Wakanda -- have some cutscenes, special locations, and special bosses; so they are worth doing. They also start a new story arc that will never be finished now, sadly, but showed a lot of promise.
• These Operations also introduced new terrain and enemies, but when you buy the game now, those locations and enemies are immediately available in various missions and events, so by the time you do the Operations, it'll feel like recycled old content.
• +1 Visually the game is really beautiful. Excellent detail to not just the heroes and their costumes but the game world in general.
• +1 New Game Plus any time.
• At any time, you can reset a campaign/operation and play it all over again with your already developed and geared heroes. Many games don't allow this, or allow it only after you've completely finished the campaign.
• Although this would have been even better if you replay mission chapters instead of having to start all over from the beginning.
• Overall I feel combat was actually really good.
• +1 You feel like the movie version of the hero when you fight as them.
• For example, Hulk feels like Hulk with how he jumps around, how he smashes things, and the amount of collateral destruction when he fights.
• +1 It looks great and somehow all works together to immerse you in the atmosphere of a superhero brawl with bodies flying around, things blowing apart, and various special finishing moves (takedowns) for each hero.
• +1 Combat controls are uniform across the characters. E.g., The heavy attack combo chain is the same key sequence for all characters.
• Some people don't like this because it feels like every character handles identically. However, it shortens the learning curve and lets you get into each character right away after having learned one.
• And despite the controls being basically the same, how each hero fights is wildly different, enough to have strong individual identity.
• +1 You get all the cosmetics that were in the cash shop for free now.
• There were extremely few cosmetics you earn in-game, and those you will still have to earn. But all the costumes for all the heroes are now free and the cash shop is closed.
• There are a lot of costumes and other cosmetics. Literally dozens of outfits for each character, for example.
• -1 Controls for some basic tasks are strangely awkward. Trying to punch something right in front of you is actually remarkably hard. Trying to open a box can actually take quite a bit of positioning before you can properly use the interaction prompt.
• -1 Controls can be buggy in unexpected and unacceptable ways.
• For example, often when you first open the character menu and click on a piece of gear to look at the options there, the game instead opens the skill page. And sometimes it takes multiple clicks of a button to get it to register.
• These UI issues shouldn't even exist, much less over a year since launch.
• -0 Repeatable missions feel the same.
• This I think was one of the big concerns and if you are grinding the game for gear and skills it can certainly make things feel monotonous in a hurry.
• There is however an attempt to randomize various things, mostly substituting one type of door-unlocking puzzle with another. Still, you know what to expect each time.
• Overall, I think while it is true that the missions end up feeling too much the same despite the randomization each time, I don't feel this is an entirely valid complaint. Even if they had a few more types of missions, players would invariably gravitate toward whatever they could clear most easily and get bored of repeating that.
• -0 Also, like basically every game, single player or online multiplayer, there's basically nothing to do except repeat content after the story is over.
• I don't feel that a newer game like Marvel's Avengers can really be faulted for this, however I also feel that the studio's strength is in single player games. Multiplayer games are a different animal that has different expectations, and I think the studio couldn't really meet those expectations, whether it was due to planning or resources.
• I recommend playing this game as a single player story experience, and not grind. Periodically revisit to get your fix of feeling like a superhero, but don't just sit down and do mission after mission.
• -0 Note that the repeatable missions are designed for multiplayer.
• Some missions, such as rescuing hostages that are scattered about the map, are really better for multiple real players who can coordinate. The AI doesn't change their behavior to account for the mission type so they often just follow you, making you have to scramble to protect all hostage locations simultaneously.
• Overall they are doable, although often with less than perfect success.
• -1 Gearing is lacklustre
• Gear traits aren't impactful during levelling.
• Where there's a visual FX (e.g., when bonus missiles are supposedly launched under certain conditions) is so fast and minor it gets lost in the thick of combat so you don't even see it happening.
• Lots of gear have a small reduction to a type of damage. But as you level, you are constantly just throwing things away for better stats. Even if you liked a trait, you were unlikely to retain the piece of gear.
• Gear traits are weird.
• Like a percentage chance of sprouting missiles to counterattack when something happens, like when you dodge or get hit.
• This really makes no sense for various characters such as the Hulk. Where did the missiles come from?
• It's obviously about randomizing traits on gear, but the result is just weird.
• -1 Levelling is pointless and deceptive
• You are not really levelling: You are not getting stronger when enemies are constantly scaled. There must be a limit to enemy scaling or some mechanic to outpace it for you to actually feel you are getting stronger. Maybe in the late game this will be true with optimizing your gear attributes and your skill perk unlocks but it's a long way there.
• For most of the game, levelling is just unlocking different redundant skills because you chose the "wrong" one -- you chose something you ended up not really liking and there's no way to change your choice.
• -1 The whole looter-shooter concept is just plain weird in a superhero game.
• Like Thor's hammer. We just picked up another hammer? Really? Or a new spine for the Hulk? (No I'm not kidding).
• I get that they are using the looter-shooter model, but maybe it just doesn't really work that well in this genre and instead just reduces immersion.