It's here. Hollywood's most profitable brand has taken on Entertainment's most profitable medium: through proxy. That's right, instead of opening up a studio, securing talent and starting a competitive games studio within which they could ensure quality just like they do with their movies, Marvel decided to go the cheap and easy route of just licencing out their brand and hoping for the best. (Or maybe that was more Disney's prerogative, it would fit their absolute fear of taking even the most remote of risks) But who needs on-hands development cycles and quality assurance when you can just take advantage of that one Square Enix relationship you've had for the past 18 years without any real idea what the hell they were doing with your product? (I bet literally no one at Disney has even watched a trailer for Kingdom Hearts) So that, in a uniformed and largely judgemental nutshell, is how we ended up with Square Enix's Marvel's Avengers. (How'd that turn out then?)
Well let me first start by saying that no, I do not currently own Marvel's Avengers, although I have played large parts of it and observed a lot of coverage. Each time I saw anyone else cover it my hope was the same; 'There's gotta be positives right? Someone talk about the positives!' But almost each time they were drowned and outweighed by overwhelming negatives. Now this underlines one of the core reasons that I'd be interested in this game; I love the marvel movies and think that they're great. I also love the idea of an ensemble cast game and hate how they're nearly never done in modern day gaming. I'd also love to see a high-quality game with Iron Man in it because outside of Marvel Ultimate Alliance, we've never had a chance to play as the tinman whilst having any sort of time resembling fun. (Yes, I remember playing those movie tie-ins every now and then. In my darkest nightmares.)
And let me start by saying that my initial feedback regarding Marvel's Avengers is that it was fun for what I got to play, even if some of the tedium started to set in before I'd done with my 10 or so hours. Quite basically the game is a simple beat-em-up style game where players assume the form of one of the Avengers and lays into armies of robots and enemies for 20 minutes bouts. There it is, that's your gameplay loop. And for what it's worth, the game pulls that off fairly well. If what you're looking for is some mindless fun then I would point you literally no further, because Marvel's Avengers has mindless fun down to a fine art. Jumping into a mission without even looking at the debrief and just stomping on enemies as Hulk or throwing your giant hammer around them as Thor is pretty much this game at it's zenith. You cannot beat the freedom of mowing down AIM bots and soldiers without a care in the world and revelling in your own power. (When that's actually feasible that is, but I'll get to that later)
The problem is that this style of gameplay isn't exactly unique; not even slightly. Many games, mostly in the 'looter', 'live service' field serve themselves up in the exact same way, and sometimes with a little more going on too. Just look at 'Destiny', 'Anthem' or 'Division', each of those games are defined by their casual play and mindless loops with the added bonus that two of them have better networking infrastructure. (In all my time I only managed to connect to one other player who quite before the game started.) So when you look at Destiny, a looter which is actually free right now, and compare it to the $60 tag attributed to this game it's quite easy to see the shortcomings of the Marvel game and lose you sense of it's value.
Take the gameplay for example, which as I said is fun for Avengers, when everything is working out. The act of smashing low level enemies into the dirt is fun, but as you get to the higher levels it isn't long before your facing up against swarms of enemies who can't be tossed around, eat damage like it's going out of style and stagger the player with every step. CC abilities aren't particularly plentiful either, as this it's a team-based action game where no actual effort was put behind the cooperation aspects, making large crowds (which makes the entirety of the late game) a slog to get through. This is in stark contrast to Destiny and Division, who are both absolute powerhouses of their respective genre, I still attest that Destiny is one of the best feeling FPS games ever made. So if Avengers can't even rate with top-tier third person action adventure games (Ghost of Tsushima and God of War literally eat this game for breakfast) then what does it have going for it?
Well then there's the narrative storyline which honestly didn't really have that much of a draw for me personally. I spent most of my time doing the random missions, in the knowledge that these made up the majority of the game, but when I did dabble there was some similarities I noticed between this game and the old Marvel classic; 'X-Men Legends'. (Which is the progenitor for Marvel's Ultimate Alliance, by the way.) Both stories focus on a newcomer to this world of Crimefighting (or Mutants) who serves as the gateway for the player to be introduced to these legends and eventually end up joining them. And both games handle this premise rather well, (though for nostalgia's sake I'd have to recommend picking up 'Legends') though it's beyond that in which the storytelling becomes a little rough.
Marvel's Avengers attempts to follow the same formula as Civil War (the comic book not the meh-movie) without any of the context which made that story pop or the background which formed the emotional connection between these characters. Marvel's Avengers relies entirely on your background knowledge of these characters to form your emotional connection, despite the fact that this specific iteration of the Avengers is distinct from the movies or the comics, so how can I compare them? Also, the narrative has absolutely no stakes behind it because the writers were cowards and went the Hollywood route instead of the actual weighty comic route. For specifics I'm going to have to get a little spoiler-y so be-prepared. In the comic book the catalyst for the Civil War event is caused because of the plethora of Superhero teams that are unchecked within the universe and allowed to run rampant.
The story starts off following a team of F-tier heroes that are on a reality show in order to make their fame, going up against a group of villains that are way out of their league. The result? Namorita corners one outside of an elementary school only for him to go nuclear; wiping out half of Philadelphia. That established actual consequence that was the fault of unchecked power. Both the movie and this game, however, try to hit the same emotional points through an incident caused by a villain that the heroes either fail to stop preemptively but still ultimately save the day (the movie) or just get blindsided and lose. (This game.) And somehow, this ends up being their fault. Did you see what the writers did there? They made it so that the inciting incident was not in anyway the heroes actual fault even remotely so that the audience can feel absolutely no contrasting opinions about them. (Because complex emotions are bad?) This makes the reason for the breakup feel forced and dumb, the years apart feel like a waste of time, and the inevitable reunion feel unearned. Good job, Square Enix, you just wrote a bad storyline. (Sorry, I know I got off off track there but you have to understand; Storytelling is literally my jam.)
So when it's all said and done you have a full priced Avengers game which is alright for mindless fun, but outpaced by a lot of cheaper rivals, bad in storytelling and did I mention buggy? I crashed 3 times during my playtime and had progress wiped after the first crash. (All progress, by-the-way, I had to start fresh. Apart from marketplace items, the game remembered that I owned them, for some reason.) I didn't play enough to notice the apparent lack of meaningful loot by the endgame, the ultra generic character designs or the fact this game only has 3 actual supervillains in it, (And I fought 2 of them!) but others have made those points abundantly clear. So what can we say about Marvel's first outing in gaming as a serious endeavour? (I count Spiderman as Sony's outing) It's a solidly average game, completely unremarkable and unfitting of the, now-prestigious, Marvel logo. For my money, it's a game that is absolutely worth about $30 at most (I would seriously recommend this for 30) but right now you'd be a lunatic to reward Square and Crystal for this ill-conceived and reportedly unfinished mess. But that's just the two-cents of someone who doesn't even own the thing, what do I know, right?
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