Have you ever wondered what it's like to be an Avenger?
With the explosive popularity the Marvel Cinematic Universe has accumulated throughout the years, it's no surprise when gamers start wanting a Marvel game. While we did get the movie tie-in games, majority of them were pretty bad.
But since the release of Insomniac's Spider-Man exclusive to PlayStation, gamers and Marvel fans alike gained hope that a Avengers game would be on the same level of quality and fun would release not too far into the future.
It did release, alright. And it did not make people happy.
Before we get started, I’d like to start off by saying that I’m an avid player of this game. I’ve got over 400 hours on Steam and probably a hundred more on the PS4. I’ve been playing this game daily since its launch in 2020. I have a lot of fun with Marvel’s Avengers and I continue to look forward to more updates. But despite that, I will be reviewing this game fairly and without any biases. As fun as this game is, there are still major flaws to it that still plague this game from launch.
About Marvel’s Avengers
Marvel’s Avengers is a live service, loot-based action RPG brawler developed by Crystal Dynamics and published by Square Enix. The game takes players into the superpowered universe of Marvel, controlling powerful heroes of the Avengers team such as Thor, Iron Man, Hulk, and Captain America.
The game was released on September 4, 2020 to a mixed reception. Critics praised the games combat and the story it tells in the Reassemble campaign, but will often criticize the lack of content and repetitiveness the games multiplayer portion, the Avengers Initiative, brings to the table.
The game was first announced when the Marvel Entertainment YouTube channel posted the Avengers Project Announcement Trailer in January 2017, essentially teasing both Marvel fans and gamers. It wasn’t until two years later in June 2019 that we had our first look at the game with the release of the first trailer for the now called Marvel’s Avengers.
Marvel’s Avengers Story
Marvel’s Avengers story follows a young Inhuman named Kamala Khan, who gained her powers during A-Day, a day dedicated to celebrating the superpowered group, the Avengers, as well as showing the world a new potential clean energy source, Terrigen. During A-Day, the Golden Gate Bridge was attacked by terrorist, leading to the Avengers springing into action to save the day, only to lose as the Terrigen source proved unstable and exploded, leaving San Francisco a contaminated zone.
Blamed for the loss of thousands of lives, the Avengers disband. Soon after, Advanced Idea Mechanics, or A.I.M, rises in their place. Five years after the events of A-Day, Kamala Khan discovers proof that reveals that A.I.M was behind the attack on A-Day. With determination, Kamala sets out to find the Avengers to reassemble them, in hopes to show the world the truth about A.I.M.
The Avengers return to save the day.
Though the Reassemble campaign was thought to be the only story related content to be released, Crystal Dynamics announced before the games release that they will be releasing story content for free, along with new characters. So far, they’ve only released Kate Bishop, Hawkeye, Black Panther, and Spider-Man (only available for PlayStation users, sadly).
Marvel’s Avengers Gameplay
If you’ve ever played games like Destiny 2 or the Division, then you might be familiar with the core gameplay. Marvel’s Avengers is a loot-based brawler, meaning players have to beat up enemies and complete missions in order to acquire gear and resources to upgrade characters. The game originally started out with six heroes, but with Crystal Dynamics releasing story content along with characters, the game now has nine (ten if you’re on PlayStation thanks to the Spider-Man exclusivity).
The Avengers goal is to stop A.I.M. from doing bad things around the world. So, in order to do that, they need to be mobile at all times, right? Enter the Chimera, a SHIELD helicarrier that acts as the Avengers mobile outpost. Players can explore the Chimera and interact with other Avengers, as well as purchase gear and cosmetics from the vendors on board. But it’s not the only outpost available to the Avengers. Players can visit other outposts to meet with other allies. Like the Ant Hill, which is the home to many Inhumans who were once captured by A.I.M., as well as Hank Pym, the Ant-Man. SHIELD Substation Zero is the main headquarters for the remaining SHIELD agents, where Maria Hill acts as director due to Nick Fury’s disappearance. Birnin Zana is the golden city of Wakanda, where Shuri resides to help the Avengers and her brother.
Each outpost features a War Table where the Avengers go to start missions, also known as War Zones, where the fun takes place. War Zones are missions where the players can play with either three other players or solo with AI. Players who complete War Zones can level up their Avengers as well as acquire gear to boost the power level of each Avenger. Aside from War Zones, the players can fight villains with daily missions called Villain Sectors. Villain Sectors features iconic villains such as Taskmaster, Abomination, Maestro, and the Scientist Supreme.
If you’re looking for more ways to acquire more powerful gear and fight stronger enemies, then Avengers has four different missions for you. In Priority Missions, you can play through a random War Zone every week that features stronger enemies with modifiers that forces the player to think about what kind of gear they have to use to avoid getting downed by enemies every two minutes. Once you push through and complete the mission, you are awarded with an Exotic gear piece for the Avenger you used in the mission.
Hive missions are another way to get more gear and to level up your heroes. In Hive missions, you have to progress through floors in an A.I.M. building and complete objectives on each floor. If you’re lucky enough and RNGesus smiles down on you, then completing Hive missions can award you with an Exotic gear piece, which are gears that provide amazing stats and perks to your characters.
Exotics work differently in this game. Unlike Destiny 2, you aren’t restricted to one weapon exotic and one armor exotic. In Marvel’s Avengers, you can have all of your gear slots be filled with exotics. Your characters can feel like gods walking down the battlefield with them on.
Omega Level Threats, or OLT, are missions whose difficulty have been dialed up to eleven, requiring a complete party of four players to enter the mission. Enemies are stronger, but the gear is rewarding. Perfect for players who have already maxed everything out and want to focus on challenging themselves.
Unfortunately, there is only one OLT mission available, and that was released in July last year. Since then, no word about any other OLT missions, so don’t get too hopeful about any OLT content if you enjoy it.
Last but not least, Avengers features a raid where players have to fight against Klaw, a villain featured in the War for Wakanda expansion. Just like the OLT, the raid requires four players to enter and beat, as this is the hardest known mission released for Marvel’s Avengers.
The Avengers assists the Black Panther in protecting Wakanda from Klaw.
While the game does feature a lot of missions, it does become very repetitive, which is the main problem with Marvel’s Avengers.
And this is coming from the guy who has over 400 hours on Steam. Probably a lot more on PlayStation too.
Priority Missions and Omega Level Threats are essentially reskinned missions with higher difficulty. Let’s not forget that the OLT is a mission that was added months after launch, and no other OLT has been added since then.
In the beginning, when players have already maxed out each Avenger, there was absolutely nothing to do but to wait for more content to drop. I’ve sunk a lot of hours into this game, and that’s from me replaying the game from the beginning with a new save file three times.
Yes, you read that right. Three times.
The game desperately needs more endgame content. Because as it stands, this game doesn’t feel like a live-service game. It just feels like a single player game with tacked on multiplayer.
Which, honestly, is what the game should have been from the beginning. In my opinion, this game should have been a single player, story focused game about the Avengers. Look at Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, a single player, story focused game about the Guardians of the Galaxy, and the game is highly praised and well received by both critics and players.
Whereas Avengers, anyone who talks about this game will say that is the biggest disappointment and a missed opportunity for something great, which I totally agree with.
Crystal Dynamics need to step up their game for 2022, because they have heavy competition from DC with the upcoming release of Gotham Knights and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.
Marvel’s Avengers Combat
Now I know I talked about the game pretty harshly, but it’s well deserved. This game does a lot of things wrong and continues to do so till this day. I do genuinely enjoy the game though, and that’s 100% because of its combat.
The game’s greatest strength is no doubt it’s this. If you’ve played games like the Batman Arkham series or Marvel’s Spider-Man on the PS4, then you’ll notice some similarities in how combat works. You have light and heavy attacks that can be chained together to perform combos, takedowns you can use by pressing triangle and circle together (or Y and B if you’re on Xbox) to deal massive damage while watching cool animations, range attacks that varies per character (Captain America throws his shield, Iron Man blasts his repulsors, Black Widow shoots with dual handguns).
Doing all of that to A.I.M. bots award you with experience, which you gain to level up your character up until level 50, which in turn grants you 50 skill points to use. Once you hit the max level, the game then introduces to you the Champion System. Players who have already reached level 50 can continue to earn more experience to level each Avenger’s Champion levels. The Champion System has a total of 375 levels per character.
Each Avenger has three sperate skills called Heroics. You have the Assault Heroic, Support Heroic, and the Ultimate Heroic. You can customize each heroic how you see fit. For example, Captain America’s Ultimate Heroic has a skill that allows you to perform takedowns on enemies with low health once activated. Personally, this is my favorite skill. But that’s the beauty of Marvel’s Avengers skill system, you can customize them the way you want.
In Avengers, you get to customize how your hero’s play. Want Thor to rain down lightning with each attack? Done. Want Captain America to do ten consecutive takedowns on groups of enemies with low health? Go wild. Want Iron Man to deploy flares to avoid projectiles? Go ahead and stay safe, buddy. You can essentially create builds for each of the Avengers so you can play them the way you want them to play.
The combat is great. It’s one of the highlights of the game and it’s what makes me continue to follow and support this game besides its massive flaws. But with the lack of endgame content and with how repetitive it is when it comes out, I can understand why people would drop this game. Combat is great, no doubt, but that won’t matter if you’re still fighting the same enemies, in the same mission, with the same characters. Crystal Dynamics needs to find a way to pump out characters and content faster than releasing them in a span of months from the previous update, because I truly don’t want this game to end before they release the Winter Soldier.
I just really want to punch bad guys with a metal arm, okay?
Marvel’s Avengers Quest/Mission System
Now we’ve talked about how missions in Marvel’s Avengers worked, so I’m not going to spend too much time explaining it again. But the game does feature quest lines where you can earn rewards. Each character has their very own Iconic Mission chains where players can earn cosmetics for each Avenger. The Iconic Missions are only interesting though for 4 of the 10 characters available. Kamala and Iron Man’s Iconic Mission chain are essentially just the Reassemble campaign, the DLC characters all have their own story missions when they released, leaving their Iconic Mission chains as just objectives you clear to earn rewards.
The Avengers Initiative multiplayer portion features a quest line that has you assisting both SHIELD and the Inhumans in their fight against A.I.M. Completing missions and objectives allows the players to progress through the quest line and also get to know the story about what happens after beating the Reassemble campaign.
There’s not much to offer once you finish the Avengers Initiative multiplayer quest line besides playing the DLC’s. Even then, all you’ll be able to do after beating the DLC’s is just to grind gear and max out your characters if you haven’t already.
Marvel’s Avengers Graphics
Marvel’s Avengers game was built with Foundation engine, the same engine Crystal Dynamics used to develop the Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, so you can probably see graphical similarities between Marvel’s Avengers and both games. While it’s not on par with the likes of Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2, Marvel’s Avenger is still beautiful to look at, especially during its action set pieces.
Iron Man looking good with Crystal Dynamic's Foundation Engine.
I’ve played this game using a R9 270X and a GTX 1660 Ti before it unfortunately died (F’s in the chat, boys). While it’s obvious that the game does perform better with the 1660 Ti, the game does surprisingly hold up well with the 270X. On the 1660 Ti, I was playing on all high settings at 1080p and I was able to get a stable 60fps throughout the game. For the 270X, the game does run well majority of the time on low settings at 1080p. I would hit 50fps most of the time, but I would drop down to as low as 25fps when fighting lots of guys. But once I start missions that takes place in an open field like the Future Wastelands, my game will start stuttering like crazy, and will crash a couple times.
The game does have some optimization issues, with PC players reporting the same issues I had, even on high end PC’s. Crystal Dynamics has released patches since its release to help optimize the game, but reports of FPS drops and stuttering continue to this day.
Marvel’s Avengers Developer
The developers at Crystal Dynamics are no strangers to making games. In fact, they’ve been around for almost 30 years now, being founded on July 8, 1992. Crystal Dynamics has a good track record of making games, such as the Tomb Raider reboot games, Legacy of Kain series, Perfect Dark, and Gex.
Yes, that Gex.
While Crystal Dynamics is experienced with creating games, I can’t help but wonder what went through their heads when they decided to make Marvel’s Avengers into a live-service type game like Destiny 2. Sure, playing with other people as different Avengers is great and fun, but in my opinion, the Avengers doesn’t work as a live-service game.
A single player game with multiplayer elements? Sure, that can work. But a live service game? No way.
People have voiced their opinions about this as well, stating that the game would have worked better if it focused on being a single player game like Marvel’s Spider-Man on the PS4.
Yet, despite the nature of the game, people were still optimistic at the prospect of a AAA Avengers game.
Unfortunately, the game released in such a massively buggy state that players couldn’t even progress through the story due to game breaking bugs. Content was barebones and repetitive after completing the story, people dropped the not even a month later. But hey, at least the customization is cool, right?
No, it’s not.
Customization only consists of outfits, nameplates, and emotes. The outfits aren’t even that good, with half of them being reskins and the other half being stuck in the marketplace.
It also didn’t help that Crystal Dynamics keeps the most requested outfits, the MCU costumes, in their online marketplace. Meaning players have to pay real money in order to unlock them for their favorite Avenger. What’s worse is that Crystal Dynamics charges you $14 for one MCU costume.
So, if you really want to play with everyone’s Endgame costumes, you better tell your boss that you want to work overtime.
Crystal Dynamics often releases roadmaps for their upcoming content and does continue to update it if there are any changes. They’ve also shown to listen to community criticism about the game. An example is when Crystal Dynamics released purchasable XP boosters.
Now this may not seem like a bad thing, but it is once you understand the story behind the controversy.
Months before the game's release, Crystal Dynamics promised players that they will only release purchasable cosmetics and nothing else. All content will be free and will feature no pay-to-win items on the marketplace. This earned Crystal Dynamics some goodwill from players.
Fast forward to a year after launch, Crystal Dynamics breaks that promise by adding purchasable XP boosters, a pay to win item to their online marketplace.
XP boosters before that were no stranger to anyone in the community. Crystal Dynamics initially added them as a free item in the marketplace as a way to let people level up faster, though it did raise some concerns that they would soon make them purchasable.
In the end, those concerns were right. The decision to add them as purchasable items sparked an outrage with the player base, with hundreds flooding the Marvel’s Avengers Twitter page to voice their concerns. The developers then went radio silent, offering no explanation whatsoever about why this was added in the game. That is until a couple weeks later, the Marvel’s Avengers Twitter page announced that they will be removing the XP boosters from the marketplace. This action relieved players as it shows that the developers are indeed listening to their feedback, though it does put them on thin ice after.
To make up for it, Crystal Dynamics revealed Shipment, a new way to earn cosmetics, which excited players at the prospect of being able to earn them by playing the game instead of paying real money. As of the time of writing this, Crystal Dynamics has released Hawkeye’s Civil War costume through Shipments. This indicates that MCU costumes, which are normally $14 in the marketplace, are now earnable for free by playing.
Crystal Dynamics had a very rocky start with this game, and players like myself are scared that one day, support will be discontinued and we will have to wait possibly years for another Avengers game.
Marvel’s Avengers Price
Marvel’s Avengers is currently available on PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One X and S, Xbox Series X and S, Steam, and Stadia for $39.99, but it’s also available on Xbox Game Pass if you’re a member. In game purchases are purely cosmetic, so you don’t have to buy anything unless you really want to look cool.
As an avid player of the game, I can only recommend this game to anyone who are really big Marvel and Avengers fans. Because right now, it’s not worth the price. Wait for a sale or borrow it from a friend just to try it.
Final Verdict
When this game first came out, I gave it a 5 out of 10. Mostly because I love the combat, characters, and story it tells. Everything else is just buggy or straight up broken. But as of right now, with the release of new characters, story, and updated game mechanics, I’ll give it a 6. It’s not good or bad, just mediocre at best.
This game still has a lot to do if it wants to be in the same leagues as the other Marvel games. While games like Spider-Man and Guardians of the Galaxy are great single player game experiences, people will still flock back to Avengers due to the developers' promise to release more characters and content for free.
Until another Avengers game comes out, we’ll have to settle for Marvel’s Avengers by Crystal Dynamics for now.
Pros
- Great combat
- Story and characters make the game feel like an MCU movie
- Continuous support from developers
Cons
- Bugs and glitches that are still present since launch
- Boring and repetitive endgame
- Marketplace is expensive and full of reskinned costumes
