September 4th was the day Square Enix's new Marvel game was released. Those that preordered the deluxe edition got it 3 days early. It was revealed a few years before and left many fans of the MCU interested. As you can tell, you can play with all 5 of the available Avengers as seen in the films as well as a new Inhuman character from the comics, Kamala Khan or "Miss Marvel." The game is available on PS4, Xbox one, and PC and it was later revealed a free PS5 upgrade will come with the game once that console is released. I will be reviewing this game with as little spoilers as possible in a small summary of the first level.
The story starts off with Kamala and her dad visiting San Francisco for Avengers day. After a terrorist attack happens at the Golden Gate bridge, you later get to play as the Avengers one by one. It feels great at first playing as Thor, Iron-man, Hulk, Captain America, and Black Widow fighting off these terrorists. But I think many players started to realize as you went farther into playing these characters, the more they all feel the similar.
You got Thor and Iron-man who can fly and shoot things. Black Widow and Kamala who can grapple and fight both melee and ranged attacks. Then Hulk and Captain America who simply just beat up enemies. And that isn't to say that's a bad thing, it's just very noticeable if you play the same style without making combos or switching weapons.
Anyways, you find who set up the attack which is none other than Taskmaster. I feel like they added him as a collab to the new Black Widow movie that was supposed to come out this month if it wasn't for the pandemic. Especially since you fight him as her during his boss fight. This isn't the first time this Marvel villain was in a video game. Last we saw him was in Insomiac's Marvel's Spider-Man where he gave you challenges to complete and occasional mini-boss battles with him.
The story isn't the main focus though. Many people agree although predictable, its still enjoyable. The gameplay is what everyone talks about. When this game released as a beta, it was very buggy and matchmaking didn't work. Yet sadly those problems were still active on release. Examples include failed online matchmaking, game crashes, and framerate drops.
However lets just talk about when the game actually works. Well there's a light attack button, heavy attack button, dodge and jump button. The way characters play is very basic and repetitive if you don't try making any combos. All you do is mash buttons and search for chests scattered around the map. I'd say the best character to play was Iron-man as you can fly, shoot beams, lasers or rockets. If you played the division or any of these other "loot-grind" games, then you have already played this game.
They just patched the game with a recent update that fixed "1,000 bugs" so yes, this game has a long way to go to be good. Games like Battlefront 2 managed to recover from a bad launch and backlash, and with the studio actually listening to the fans for feedback I am very optimistic for this game's future. Maybe they'll even change the whole game together for the better.
For now I suggest getting the game on discount or waiting a year or so when more patch updates happen. Maybe even get it on PlayStation as Spider-Man will be an exclusive playable character next year. Overall the game is decent at best when it actually starts to work.
