Marvel's Avengers

Marvel's Avengers is the best game to feel like a real avenger. Its history and gameplay make the game a very enjoyable experience for all superhero lovers.

After a long time waiting, Marvel's Avengers arrives with a powerful campaign, well-constructed characters and the promise of a constantly evolving future.

Whether you’re an avid Marvel fan or simply enjoy sinking numerous hours into action RPGs, there’s a lot to love about Marvel’s Avengers. Its characters and its world have been brought to life with a lot of care and detail, making it a pleasure to spend time with. But it’s just how fun the game is that really draws you in. It’s a Hollywood action movie you can play, basically. Sit back, relax, and enjoy punching, shooting, flying and looting. It might not require much in the way of brainpower, but it’s one heck of an enjoyable ride.

Marvel's Avengers nails plot and characterization, giving us an absolutely lovable Kamala Khan and delivering some stunning and single-player missions. Where the game disappoints is in the many co-op missions, which feel too repetitive and uninteresting, and in a bit too many bugs. The end result is a mixed bag between a great single-player third-person action-adventure and a disappointing GaaS experience.

Avengers has the legs for a good games as a service model. It can stand on its own for a while, and with new content coming as soon as this month, it should keep things fresh. Now, that doesn’t mean monotony won’t set in, it most certainly does. Especially after finishing the best part of the game – the story missions. These types of games live and breathe on their player base and so far, it’s been alright. Only time will tell, and we’ll see how long Avengers is supported. While right now, Marvel’s Avengers is a good game that has a few issues here and there, but a fun time nonetheless, in a year’s time, it could very well be a great game with more varied content. There is most certainly the potential for that here. Let’s hope it actually happens.

Marvel's Avengers is not particularly great at any one thing. Instead, it's just okay at a lot of things, and that's all it really needs to be.

If Marvel's Avengers were an MCU movie, it'd be Age of Ultron. It's perfectly entertaining and well put together, with some great set-pieces, but it isn't necessarily one you're going to return to again and again.

Marvel's Avengers is sprawling and spectacular, messy and bloated all at the same time. There's a surprisingly fun and lengthy campaign here, excellent writing and acting and some of the best superhero brawling in the business. It excels at allowing you to really feel like you're fighting alongside your favourite superheroes as you decimate enemies and destroy scenery, but it loses some of that swagger as it enters its online endgame. There's a half-baked gear system, convoluted menus and questlines and some technical issues that make fighting online feel a little rough around the edges at this point in time. However, with a couple of patches, with the right support down the line in terms of new heroes, costumes, bad guys and story beats, Crystal Dynamics could be on to a winner here. This is a properly solid start and a pleasant surprise.

As a whole, the game is interesting, thanks to a (too?) complete customization system and complementary superheroes. On the other hand, the player often finds himself confronted with awkward choices and great redundancy synonymous with repetitive missions... Although Crystal Dynamics has, unlike BioWare with Anthem, avoided the trap of unbalanced loot, the game remains, as it is, simply attractive if not essential.

Unfortunately, it seems the more of Marvel’s Avengers you play, the less likely you are to come away with an overall positive experience. The single player by itself might take you up to 10 hours but diminishing returns for the multiplayer aspects set in rather fast. The single player is Hulk: strong, fast and a surprise when you aren’t expecting it. The multiplayer is Bruce Banner: calculated, small, and has the potential to be something powerful but isn’t quite there yet.

As a standalone Marvel experience, this gets the job done, but it certainly wasn't worth the years of buildup or the epic placement it has as one of the top AAA games of 2020. It's less of an Avengers: Endgame and more of an Ant-Man and the Wasp, a perfectly serviceable comic adventure that will draw players in when there's a new story available, but probably not before.

Now that Marvel's Avengers is dirt cheap, it might be worth a play for the impressive action sequences and impressive visuals. Maybe with enough people picking it up at a much more agreeable price, it might inject the tedious co-op modes. It certainly did not deserve the utter disdain it received, and was at best just a corporate, tone-deaf project that nobody wanted. It is rotten with executive sleaze for sure, and the game can feel like work a lot of the time due to the grind, but there is an ok experience in this somewhere. It is buried beneath all the obnoxious writing, grinding, and generic design.

Marvel's Avengers is the most broken gaming experience in 2020, and even if it was polished, it would be severely flawed.