Marvel’s Avengers is a game I have been anticipating ever since it was just called “The Avengers Project”, with how big the MCU and superheroes in general are right now you would think that there would be some more full on Marvel video games but there really is not. In the beginning of the MCU there were Captain America and Thor tie-in games that fell short of the mark and Marvel Heroes which was put to an early grave that I still mourn over today. I can say with some confidence that while Marvel’s Avengers is not flawless it is pretty close to everything I would want in a super hero game, and comes pretty close to filling the hole in my heart that Disney put there when they killed off Marvel Heroes.
To put it bluntly Marvel’s Avengers is Destiny but Marvel, it has that same loot grind aspect, getting gear score up, talking to vendors, completing daily quests for those vendors all while running around as an Avenger. The game starts you off with the option to play through the campaign or jump straight into the Avengers Initiative, which is the game’s multiplayer/replay-able mission mode, the campaign is very well done and focuses on Kamala Khan, an Avenger super fan/fan fiction writer, trying to get the Avengers back together after they had disbanded following the events of A-day. Kamala Khan is a relatively new character from what I understand and I think some people may be put off not being solely focused on the MCU Avengers, but the writers did a pretty good job at fitting her in with the Avengers that we have grown to love from the MCU over the last 10 years. The campaign took me about twelve hours to complete and during it they give you a decent look at each of the main six characters while you run around trying to defeat A.I.M and MODOK as they are trying to rid the world of super-powered individuals. The campaign is a good taste of what's to come but the Avengers Initiative is where the real juice is.
The Avengers Initiative is what happens after the events of the campaign and what the Avengers are trying to do to stop A.I.M for good. There are smatterings of narrative content here but for the most part it's about these drop zones and warzones that are objective based missions where you have to kill enemies, defend or rescue your allies in the field or hold a point, sometimes the missions contain multiple of these types of objectives. These missions reward you loot for completing them, loot for finding and opening chests and loot for killing enemies. It's a loot game, you will get lots of loot for doing almost everything so you can work to get that precious gear score up to the max. The main complaint that was going around before launch about the loot system is that it has no cosmetic effect on your character, which I totally understand, one of the driving forces to run these missions over and over for loot is to get the one that makes you look the coolest and this game does not really have that. There are enough perk and stat differences depending on how you want to spec your character that even without the cosmetic aspect of loot there are plenty of reasons to try and get that good loot roll.
The thing that got me hooked with this game over other games of its kind is the ability to just swap through the six different characters at will before each mission. If I chose to play as Iron Man at the beginning of the Avengers Initiative I wasn't stuck with him forever or even for a period of time. I could do six missions in a row each with a different character and that was very appealing to me, even if I never really want to play as Hulk. Each character has three full skill trees that you can use to customize your character’s playstyle to the way you want them to play. The main skill tree is a basic one with different attacks and abilities which are just unlocked when you use a skill point on them, the other two trees have options that you toggle through based on how you want to play. For example Kamala’s support ability which normally is just a heal for her and your teammates can be turned into self revive in one tree and in another tree you can choose to have two charges of the ability as opposed to one. This gives every character a ton of options for how to play them and those skill loadouts can change based on if you are playing solo, with a team or even with certain other characters. The variety of the characters and how you can spec them is huge and makes it very fun to mess around with different skill builds to find the one that you really enjoy.
While the in mission and in combat gameplay is fantastic the moments that you are forced to spend outside of missions are not great. The things it forces you to do outside of mission are things like talking to faction vendors to get daily quests and talking to a different vendor to cash in your faction level ups. Also these vendors and other vendors sell gear, resources and cosmetic items that you can purchase with non-real money currencies. The problem here is getting around the two outposts is very tedious. The helicarrier you start off on has the vendors on complete opposite ends of the ship and on different levels, running around from each of these is way too slow and there is no fast travel option or anything like it. This is an issue that Anthem faced at launch and they were relatively quick to fix it so I hope Crystal Dynamics comes up with a fix for this because it's really my only big gripe with the game outside of technical or monetization complaints, which I will get to later.
With Marvel’s Avengers being a live service game with all future DLC characters and content being free there has to be a way they are trying to keep the money flowing for the game, and there is. Each character has their own challenge card with 40 levels, challenge cards are like battle passes, each character gets two daily challenges and two weekly challenges and completing those get you points towards the next level on your card. On the card you get things like resources to upgrade gear, emotes, takedowns, skins and credits, the paid currency. Crystal Dynamics has said that each card has a free tier and a premium tier with the premium tier costing $10 or 1000 credits. The premium challenge cards for each of the launch characters has been unlocked for free and if you were to finish a challenge card you would get 1300 credits, enough to buy the next new character’s premium challenge card, and these challenge cards never expire so you don't have to worry about missing out on credits because you could not play for a bit. This means from the base game you can get enough credits for seven, almost eight, premium challenge cards if you were to not spend the credits elsewhere.
Speaking of spending credits elsewhere you can spend the credits on cosmetics in the marketplace with legendary outfits currently going for $14 and epics going for $9. In the marketplace you get every kind of cosmetic, outfits, nameplates, emotes, takedowns, you name it you can buy it. The good thing about this system is that nothing is random, there is not even an option right now to buy a random cosmetic lootbox. If you see a sick Iron Man outfit that you want you can buy it directly. $14 does seem like a lot for one outfit for a character but unfortunately that is the price that the market has set for these kinds of items. But again this is all 100% cosmetic and has zero effect on the gameplay of the game so at the end of the day it is completely up to you how much that pricing turns you away and if just unlocking the premium card for future characters is the best way for you to spend the credits.
Now even though I am very much enjoying Marvel’s Avengers and I will continue to for a long time it is not a perfect game. Multiple times throughout the campaign my cutscenese froze up only to fast forward to catch up to where the game thought they should be, causing me to miss some chunks of important dialogue, the loading times are crazy on PS4 Pro and I had a number of small visual bugs, like Kamala’s hair not loading in during the A-day mission or Cap’s face getting to Assassin's Creed Unity level of jank, but nothing huge that impacted my enjoyment of the game long term. I have not played the PC version but from what I have seen and heard from people that chose that platform it is much rougher over there. Crystal Dynamics has been pretty active at tackling bugs as they come up and giving timelines for bigger bug fixes. Marvel’s Avengers is a live service game that looks to stick around for a long time, right now I have some level of faith that the bugs will be fixed as they show up.
The path to release for Marvel’s Avengers has been a somewhat rocky one having to go through confusion about what the game is, complaints about the monetization in the game and just the number of bugs that have been spotted over the three platforms, but the destination at the end of that road is currently very good and the future looks promising. I have never gotten fully invested into a live service game, I have enjoyed them for 20-40 hours in the past, but Marvel’s Avengers has gotten its hooks into me and the drip of content from new missions to new characters looks to keep me going for some time now.
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