Video Game Review: Marvel’s Avengers

Marvel’s Avengers

Square Enix

Third-Person Action RPG

Xbox One, Playstation 4, PC, Stadia

I have been waiting for this game to release since the release of the trailer in January 2017. That trailer didn’t even have any gameplay or story elements or anything. It’s just a voiceover with shots of an Iron Man glove, Cap’s shield, and other stuff. But it was enough to get me on board with the game. And now, three and a half years later, we can play Marvel’s Avengers, but does it live up to the hype?

During A-Day, a day celebrating the Avengers, there’s an attack on the Golden Gate Bridge. The Avengers do what they can, but fail leaving San Francisco in ruins, and many people injured and dead, including Captain America. Five years later, there’s a ban on superheroes and A.I.M. has risen in place of the Avengers. Due to the use of terrigen, a newly discovered power source by the Avengers on A-Day, people infected are gaining powers and are dubbed “inhuman”. One of the “inhuman” is Kamal Khan, a teenager, and fan of superheroes and the Avengers.

For the most part, we see the story play out through the perspective of Kamala Khan. She finds proof of A.I.M. doing wrong and sets off on a journey to reassemble the remaining Avengers. This game really shines when it comes to the main plot of the campaign. I like Ms. Marvel in the comics, and I think they do justice to the adapted story of her origin in this game. Anyone that’s a fan of comic books and superheroes can for sure see a little bit of themselves in her. But, as the title of the game may suggest, it’s not 100% a story about Kamal Khan, though she does play a big part. It’s a story about the Avengers and putting aside their differences after their biggest failure to do what’s right. To fight a foe no single hero could withstand.

This is a video game, so the story alone can’t carry the whole thing by itself. Fortunately, the gameplay with most characters is great. It’s simple enough, a light attack, a heavy attack, three special abilities for everyone. Thor and Iron Man can fly, Black Widow and Ms. Marvel can grapple ledges and swing from things. There’s enough diversity for each character to feel different enough from the next. Punching enemies as Ms. Marvel, and then embiggening and swatting them away with ease is great. It feels different from throwing Thor’s hammer at a group of enemies and hitting them again when you call it back to you. The only one that lacks a little “oomph” to them is the Hulk. He’s the Hulk, but it takes the same amount of punches as Ms. Marvel to down a simple baseline enemy. Except for one or two campaign missions though, you don’t have to play as the Hulk.

Some main campaign missions will stick you with a specific character, mostly when they are introducing them into the narrative, but after that, you have some freedom to choose who you play as. There are character-specific mission chains, but you can complete them as whoever you like. There is a power rating, and character level ups in the game as well. Leveling up lets you put a skill point into the character, giving them new attacks, or upgrading their abilities. Power levels are determined by the gear you equip a character with, and what level it is. The gear is easy to obtain, there are chests throughout each mission that can contain the gear (or other collectibles), and you can equip and upgrade it all at any time in the character menu. No mission is locked behind a certain character or power level, either. Meaning you can take your level 3 Hulk with a power level of 10 into a fight with Taskmaster that’s recommended for a power level of 39. Which is something I did. If you’re wondering, I lost.

You can play side missions solo, with AI teammates, or with real people in multiplayer. The Multiplayer doesn’t feel all that different from the single-player experience. You’re with your team, and they focus on their own enemies until there’s too few and you’re four heroes beating on one robot. A live person may make better decisions than the AI, but from my experience, there’s not a big difference. During the few days of the early access, there were a few times I had trouble finding anyone in matchmaking. With the game being fully released, it’s not an issue anymore.

Of course, this game is not without its flaws, as much as I might make it seem. There’s a repetition to the levels that become really easy to notice when you play for a while. The side missions all boil down to a simple formula that gets repeated for most of them. “Go to this place, fight the enemies, take this elevator. Now that you’re in this building fight these enemies and do ____.” That blank line is either free these captured Inhumans, destroy these generators, or hack into this computer. The hacking is also simple, where you’re controlling three squares for a certain amount of time, and not letting A.I.M. take control of them. There are different regions in the game, Utah Badlands, the east coast USA, Siberia. They look different from each other, but the layouts of the map are all too similar in each region. Utah has deserts and cliffs, all the same, brown/red-ish desert tone. Siberia is snowy, the east coast is a generic city. There are small changes to the layouts, but after playing for a bit, it’s all too familiar.

There’s no major video game release that doesn’t have bugs these days. It shouldn’t happen, but it does and we all just kind of accept it and move on. Avengers certainly has its fair share. The game looks great graphically, for the most part. But if you look at a character with long hair it looks unnatural and weird. Unfortunately, four out of six main characters have longer hair. The first time I ventured into matchmaking, Ms. Marvel, with her powers, stretched her arm across the entire map. The gameplay wasn’t affected, but the character model’s arm was permanently stretched off-screen until we loaded into a new area of the mission. There are cutscenes where objects didn’t load in, meaning I got to see a new power of Ms. Marvel’s, where she can just lay down in mid-air on top of nothing.

Those aren’t even the biggest bugs though, since they can be moved past in a couple of minutes. I spent two nights playing through the campaign and got to the final campaign mission. My game froze, so I restarted it, and when I went to load it up again, I spent half an hour on a loading screen. No matter what I did, I would be in an infinite loading screen, not able to finish the game. Searching online, I did find that I wasn’t the first or last person to have this problem. I did have to delete my save file, and paly the entire campaign again, losing all progress and character upgrades. This did happen during the early release period for certain pre-orders, and nothing as catastrophic as that has happened to me since then. Though I still do get the occasional glitch in the visuals, and the hair on characters has never looked right.

I’d be wrong to not mention that this game does have microtransactions and will have more in the future. There’ll be free character updates, bringing in new characters like Hawkeye, Black Panther, and others, free to everybody. But they will also have a $10 battle pass that you can buy that have 40 tiers of unlockable rewards. In-game gear can be unlocked with in-game currency that you earn by playing the game. Fragments and resources can be found and earned during actual gameplay. There are also cosmetic vendors in-game, that you can use in-game currency to buy cosmetic items, like nameplates and costumes. But cosmetic items have no actual effects on gameplay, it’s all purely cosmetic, as the name implies. Then there’s an actual marketplace in the main menu where you can use real money to buy cosmetic items, and the aforementioned battle passes for characters. The main six characters in the base game will have their “hero challenge cards” unlocked for free. Each challenge card, once completed, will reward 1000 credits, and in theory with those you don’t have to spend any actual money to get another one.

My big problem with it though, besides the idea and mechanics of micro-transactions, are some of the prices you can already see. One costume for one character right now is 1400 credits. Credits are sold as 500 for $5, meaning it’s $14 for one costume. A cosmetic item that doesn’t affect gameplay. And it’s only one! That’s ridiculous, in my opinion (and I’m sure many others). It’s too common a practice in modern video games, and there have been many more conversations about the entire subject, so I’ll leave it at that.

This game has a lot of glitches and bugs. It’s got repetitive mission structures and environments. Don’t forget the microtransactions and battle passes. With that being said, I personally don’t know if I’ve ever enjoyed playing a game more. There’s a great narrative that’s well-acted. The actual gameplay is fun and makes a distinction between how each character actually plays. I’ve had to go through the entire campaign twice, but I had a smile on my face the whole time. You get to play as The Avengers. There’s a definite hint of the MCU characters thrown in, but there’s a deep root in the comic book side of things as well. The problems with bugs and glitches will be sorted out in time, I’m sure like most games are. Fans of the comics, or the movies, or those that overlap both will enjoy this game and getting to play as some of their favorite superheroes.