I started the game myself without much hype . I’ve seen a few movies from the Marvel Cinematic Universe so I roughly know who’s who and I have a so-called concept about imagination, but I can’t be called a die-hard fan. So I hope that my view of the matter was as objective as possible and that I can discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the title without prejudice, be it positive or negative. And there is much to talk about!
Old new heroes
A cursory knowledge (or even lack of it) of the already mentioned MCU will not be a big obstacle for us here, because Marvel’s Avengers has its own, alternative story, which is supposed to stay closer to the comic book original than to the big screen creation. It can be seen in the characters themselves, among which we will not find digital portraits of Robert Downey Jr. or Scarlett Johansson, but completely original models with the voices of new actors. However, it is not a 100% faithful copy of comic book drawings, but rather another reinterpretation – for example, Nick Fury does not resemble Samuel L. Jackson and has his iconic black and white hairstyle, but remains black.
Each character has its own set of blows and skills, so that individual heroes play differently, even if the basic controls remain the same. This, of course, highlights the advantages and disadvantages of our Avengers, which we must pay attention to when sitting at the controls. Some dependencies can be easily guessed – for example, that Hulk will not be a speed demon – but others remain clearly less intuitive. For example, using pistols Natasha Romanoff is perhaps the worst of the team in ranged combat, except perhaps for Captain America throwing his shield like a Frisbee. The most effective in this respect turns out to be Iron Man, which I mistakenly suspected of high endurance and strength in melee combat. These kinds of surprises make that playing new heroes can be frustrating on the one hand, and fun on the other. Another diversification are the cosmetic elements, including numerous skins, offering us several different outfits in many color variants.
A fictional essence in a nutshell
Story told in Marvel’s Avengersnot unusual, but it effectively drives the title, encouraging the player to start through the levels to decide what happens next. Our base protagonist, from the perspective of which we follow the vast majority of events, is Kamala Khan, Miss Marvel. We meet her in the prologue as a little girl fascinated by superheroes, taking part in the A-Day (a kind of “Avengers Day”) as a distinguished participant in the competition for the best fanfiction with the Avengers in the lead role. During the disaster there, many people inhale the toxic fumes of Terrigen, which cause permanent changes in their bodies, often resulting in the appearance of supernatural abilities. One of them, i.e. Inhumans is Kamala, who can now temporarily stretch or enlarge various parts of her body.
In a large, spoiler-free shortcut, I can say that we then jump 5 years forward to find out that the Avengers were blamed for causing this incident and exposing thousands of people, as a result of which they went into the shadows, and the society under the ideological leadership of AIM looks unfavorably at people endowed with superpowers, including the already mentioned Inhumans. They are treated not only as a potential threat, but also as sick people, requiring immediate isolation and “treatment”. Most of them try to hide among ordinary people because they are caught like criminals. When Kamala is discovered, she runs away from home and goes in search of someone capable of restoring the old order, the former Avengers, or at least members of the Resistance.
In this way, together with the teenage Miss Marvel, we get in touch with new heroes who feed our team, becoming playable characters at the same time. The plot is perfectly decent and is based on similar pillars as the movie franchise, offering players what the Avengers adventures are fond of: considerations about superheroes’ place in society, their responsibility to ordinary people for catastrophic mistakes, and verbal – and not only – skirmishes between members of this amazing alliance. The whole thing is also enriched with the thread of arduous finding the truth about the events of A-Day and looking for answers to questions about whether they could have been avoided and who is really to blame. The story is perhaps not compelling enough for me to recommend Marvel’s Avengers only because of it, but also nothing is missing from it, so fans of movies and comics should like it.
Oh there villains… let’s better fight mistakes and shortcomings!
The gameplay itself is undoubtedly addictive and gives a lot of satisfaction, mixing a pleasant PvE fight with a bit of exploration and simple puzzles. However, the effect is spoiled by the number of bugs, glitches and completely wrong decisions regarding the interface, which is rarely seen nowadays. On the agenda there are opponents penetrating the walls or the floor, sometimes also completely losing orientation and simply stopping in place, allowing us to hit each other without any consequences. The latter can also happen to our allies, if we put them in the hands of artificial intelligence – one time Thor got stuck on one of the roofs and I could not get him to do anything until another cutscene, which placed him next to me. It also happens that the marker of an unopened chest will remain on the map even after it is emptied,
Some skins were also affected by bugs – after unlocking the Black Widow character in the campaign, I decided to dress her in perhaps the most iconic costume made of furiously red hair and a black latex jumpsuit. Unfortunately, to my surprise, someone responsible for applying the shadows to Natasha’s hair gave bodies, causing the woman’s hairstyle to be surrounded by a cloud of black pixels. This effect looks really boring and is visible almost constantly, whether during the game or in cutscenes – it only disappears when the shadows are lost, i.e. in highly lit places, and there are not too many of them.
An additional “attraction” is the nightmarish interface; one of the worst I have had trouble using. The Chimera, which is our base, looks like a hub characteristic for games focused on cooperation , in which, together with other players from the team, we can regroup and choose the next mission in which we will take part. Unfortunately, this is not the case – this place is a smaller transport, the Quinjet, which is not a real location at all, but only a background for our War Table, through which we browse the available tasks.
This table turned out to be a worse opponent for me than the final boss of the campaign. Its use is completely unintuitive, and we have to come to everything by trial and error, because the game does not teach us to use it effectively (if it is at all possible …). To do anything, we have to keep jumping between screens. The choice of missions is managed by one menu, the hero and his companions – the second, and the details of our hero, such as equipment, skills and appearance variant – the third.
Doesn’t that sound scary? Unfortunately it is. If, for example, we want to add a new skill to Hulk and change the skin to Thor, we will not do it in several seconds. We need to select Hulk in the first menu, exit from it, open character details, find the appropriate tab with the skill tree, level up, exit again, open the hero selection menu again, select Thor, exit again, open the hero details again, go to cosmetic changes and change the skin there and then exit again to be able to choose the mission. It is extremely tedious, and the screens are so chaotic that even after several hours of play, I made mistakes, looking for some options completely different than I should. Not to mention that it wasn’t until the end of the campaign that I learned to come back to the Chimera “upon request” …
In summary, each of these things could be forgiven individually, but all of them can effectively make the game difficult, especially when we spend a bit more time with the title. This gives us a vision of an underdeveloped game full of holes, in addition completely neglecting the user’s comfort, and this is not what we expect from an expensive AAA title.
Game-service at the beginning of its journey
As the creators declare, Marvel’s Avengers is to be a GaaS ( game as a service) title , i.e. one that will be developed and refined for a long time. There are plans for more heroes – Hawkeye, Kate Bishop, Spider-Man (due to copyright available only for the PlayStation version) and Black Panther have already been announced, and if you believe unofficial leaks, there may eventually be up to a dozen of them. We’ll likely see new skins, maps, and quests as well, and maybe more, depending on where the authors go.
At the moment, however, the game does not offer too many interesting prospects for a player who has already completed the main campaign. Further content is undoubtedly necessary for it, if it is to keep the attention of people willing to multiplayer mode, the only question is how quickly it will appear, if today the “stand” is leaky like Swiss cheese, and the irritating interface calls for vengeance to … that is, urgent attention for the upcoming patches . Well, we’ll wait – we’ll see. And this is what I recommend to people who are struggling with thoughts about the imminent purchase of this title.
We thank the publisher Cenega for the copy of the game for review.
