Marvel’s Avengers (PS5)

It is a bit of a shame that move tie-in games were on the decline right as the Marvel Cinematic Universe began to take root, because while the first few films did receive video game adaptations, the movie franchise that would become a hallmark of 2010s pop culture barely left its mark on the game industry. It is likely the games wouldn’t have been too good since the decline of licensed games was partly from years of low quality products, but licensed games are still around and have seemingly changed for the better. It became far more common for a license to be used by a talented team that was actually given time to make the game and even tell their own stories with the brand, so when Crystal Dynamics revealed Marvel’s Avengers, it wasn’t quite an adaptation of the movies and so had the room to be something unique. It was however impacted by another reality of the game industry, the desire to keep a game alive for years with a drip feed of content rather than making a complete experience, and so the question became less about the license and more about the toll this design decision might take on the experience as a whole.

Marvel’s Avengers is an action game where a squad of superheroes from the titular superhero team head out on missions where you and up to three human players or AI allies can fight together. However, when the game begins it actually focuses much more on single-player content in a cohesive story, the plot beginning with the young Kamala Khan getting a chance to meet the Avengers aboard their new experimental aircraft the Chimera. The opening is actually a fairly well constructed introduction to the heroes while also being a treat for long time fans of the Marvel brand, Kamala herself admiring the band of superheroes and happy to explore the merchandise-riddled special event being hosted with its museums and references on top of moments where you get to see the superheroes themselves and learn about their personalities. While there are similarities between the movie versions of the Avengers and those you see in-game, they also incorporate a fair bit of comic history and original details so having this moment that lets you learn it all without any concerns over combat provides a solid establishing moment before the story truly begins.

A terrorist attack interrupts the presentation of the Chimera, but soon it becomes clear there is something wrong with the Chimera’s experimental Terrigen power core, something the Avengers can’t fix despite their range of powers and expertise. The airship crashes into San Francisco bay and releases a gas that begins to infect the people of the city, those who weren’t killed often exhibiting dangerous new superpowers. These mutates are dubbed Inhumans and the footprint of this day leads to the catastrophe being dubbed A-Day as the Avengers disband in the wake of it to avoid any future devastating collateral damage of such magnitude. However, in the wake of their disbandment, Advanced Idea Mechanics steps forward and begins providing robotic assistance to the people of the world but with the hidden intent of rounding up the super-powered Inhumans to run tests on them and learn how to use their abilities to further their hold over a post-Avengers society. Kamala has become an Inhuman due to her exposure to the Terrigen Mist and starts to learn of A.I.M.’s darker intentions, believing only the Avengers have any hope of preventing them from essentially establishing a robotic totalitarian rule. However, the superheroes have hidden from sight and are anything but super now, Kamala struggling to find them, light the fire of heroism in their hearts again, and hopefully restore them into a team that can oppose A.I.M.’s enormous forces.

Kamala is a strong foundation for this adventure, the player spending a lot of time getting to know her both through comments she makes during gameplay and during cutscenes that focus mostly on her development from a young woman who can stretch her limbs into someone more like the heroes she wants the disbanded Avengers to be. Marvel’s Avengers is very much her story as she grapples with her Inhuman status in a world where people want them hunted down due to the lingering memories of A-Day, and having to face versions of heroes like Iron Man who have become depressed or given up on fighting the good fight pushes her to step forward and be the change she wants to see. You get to spend time playing as the other Avengers as well and follow how they come to terms with the impact of A-Day, although near the end of the main story you do start to get some of them introduced into the adventure without too much time to examine how they adjusted to life after the Avengers or how they’re adjusting to returning to heroism. Still, Kamala’s personal journey is the highlight, the story actually playing differently from the rest of the game at times as the single-player sections are willing to throw together bombastic chase scenes, quiet exploration, and a greater devotion to special boss fights than the multiplayer missions that make up the rest of the game.

Battles where you and your team cross large open areas to reach objectives or search for hidden treasures make up the majority of the game after you’ve completed the main plot, and luckily the battle system has a few layers to it and a good handful of characters to shake up its design. At its simplest every character has basic attacks and power attacks that can link together in different combos, but depending on who you play as the way these work can be quite different. Kamala’s stretchy limbs let her fight from further away than someone like Captain America or Hulk who get in close to fight while Iron Man’s power attacks are blasts from his gauntlets that let him mix his punches with projectiles. Thor and Iron Man both can fly and have different attack options while doing so while every character has some sort of long range attack, be it the rapid fire pistols of the secret agent Black Widow or the Norse god Thor hurling his hammer to potentially pin an enemy to the floor. Characters can have unique systems like Hulk’s Rage where the big brute can start healing while hitting foes to make up for the damage he likely takes being the biggest target and Iron Man’s suit lets him swap between blasts, lasers, and rockets with their own unique benefits. Similarly, every character has a set of special abilities that need time to charge, although the balance between heroes can seem a bit off. Iron Man will pop into the enormous invincible Hulkbuster armor to smash foes with powerful attacks for his Heroic Ability while Kamala’s Embiggening makes her large and strong but without the protection, although she can strike faster than the Hulkbuster and each hero can have different advantages. Characters can have a power focused on increasing their strength for a time while others have abilities focused on one powerful attack, and as you level them up through battle they can start to unlock new combo chains, different specializations for their power moves, and add extra effects to attacks to make them more useful. While some characters like Hulk are a bit unwieldy as a sacrifice for strength, the fighting styles of many of them can have a nice flow to them that makes attacking even basic enemies somewhat satisfying.

Oddly enough though the game features a loot system where your character power is tied more to the equipment they wear then their character level. Although having superheroes running around opening treasure chests to get specific gear is a strange direction for the genre, the equipment system spends a long time simply being the way you increase your strength and defense rather than something you need to pay too much active attention to. You can press a button on the character screen to automatically equip the best gear you have and any extra effects won’t make much difference for a majority of the game. It can be neat to see your attacks have a poisoning effect or even shrink an enemy briefly but only the extremely demanding post-game content would ask for close attention to be paid to the armor you’re slapping on. There are a plethora of vendors to be found selling gear, some requiring you to gain trust with their faction to buy the better stuff but their faction goals are often easily completed while doing normal content. The odd thing about the gear though is that it costs the game’s most abundant currency: Fragments.

Fragments are easy to find and can be made by destroying old equipment but for a surprising amount of time, the game would not allow you to view how many fragments you had when shopping. A late update patch would finally clear this up, but in general Marvel’s Avengers does complicate a lot of things with no clear aim, many simple but useful menus requiring you to find the right person to talk to while in the right place. This usually is a tactic for confusing the player to draw them towards spending real world money on in-game conveniences or items, but Marvel’s Avengers mostly tied its monetization to buying cosmetics like costumes and emotes or unlocking the Challenge Card rewards where doing certain things as a hero gives you special rewards. These menus are very separate and not rammed in your face too often and even the lootbox’s original state was surprising, the player able to see the contents and spending the games Units to open them instead of the premium currency you were initially encouraged to buy with real money. As part of the game’s final update though, all previous premium content was made immediately available, a huge amount of unique and interesting costumes now free to use without any barriers to acquisition, and for people still looking for some special unlockables there are still character outfits you purchase with the rewards from your missions.

The rough menus aren’t the only foundational issue with Marvel’s Avengers, there are a fair few glitches that can damage the experience at parts like when I did a short Iron Man training mission he refused to fly so the game wouldn’t progress. Sometimes an AI partner can get stuck in a corner so you’re fighting as if you’re a man down until something like an area change jostles them free. Other times important things like health bars disappear and enemies can sometimes end up inside walls, but these are usually pretty rare or can be worked around. Something that has a more consistent impact on the game though is its surprisingly shallow pool of enemy types. In the main story this is again not too much of an issue, the game can make a basic humanoid robot differently dangerous by having them appear in regular battles, stealth sections, and run-or-die chases, and the plot also throws a few major villains at you in battles where the foe is specifically tailored to the hero they’ll be fighting, the final confrontation with the game’s main antagonist Tarleton even evolving into a fight where each hero gets a special segment to play to their combat skills. In more typical missions, some of which do crop up in the plot, you’ll spend a lot of time fighting humanoid machines that do have some variation between them but still start to grow rote. Regular synthoids just try to punch you and are easy to kill, a few upgraded versions are more durable and have special attack methods like electrified clubs, and some are fiery or irradiated and are dangerous because they come in large groups and detonate on death. There are other enemy types like drones that fly through the air and either fire at you or buff up the other robots and gunmen crop up that can hit you with freezing shots or gravity wells to pin you, but the game has a lot of little battles with bands of basic robots and they do grow a bit stale. Big enemies are thrown in at times, larger battle mechs and walking tanks giving a big central enemy to spice up fights and make the basic robots more about pestering you while trying to focus on the truly dangerous target, and sometimes a mission will have you trying to break tech or protect normal people so the fight is less about breaking apart all the machines and more about trying to balance fighting them with the objective.

Mission areas do start to get recycled a fair bit and even though specific regions like the Utah Badlands, Pacific Northwest, and Snowy Tundra are all visually different and can contain interior bases, these huge spaces often like to focus the fights in similar areas so they become quite familiar. The game begins to start to stretch its content thin as you start doing more of the post-game and optional content, some areas like the city environment of the Eastern Seaboard oddly enough underutilized despite how fresh visiting them feels compared to the enormous yet limited natural spaces. Luckily though the mission chains do try to spice things up. Mission chains provide some secondary content with a bit more structure than the randomly appearing ones but rely on the familiar environments to some degree. A fair few of these are hero specific and thus have some story tied to them, the player getting to know a character a bit better and learn a bit more about how they handled things post A-Day. Some of these are very basic though, Captain America’s more regular missions with a few inspiring speeches tacked onto them while Black Widow’s seems better conceived as it takes you to an underwater base and Thor’s has an interesting element of a Thor imitator to add a little mystery to the journey. Some content expansions have increased the game’s more curated content though so there is well beyond 20 hours of story-focused play to be had, although their quality is a bit inconsistent. The introduction of the archer Kate Bishop provided a new hero with a distinct fighting style only for Hawkeye’s addition after to have the same normal attacks while swapping out his specials, but he gets an interesting new area from a post-apocalyptic future for his story levels while Kate is trudging through the same snowy environment that isn’t at all new. The War for Wakanda addition is definitely a huge improvement though, Black Panther a unique fighter with a detailed hub area and jungle setting on top of sections devoted to single-player puzzle solving and battles with not only new human enemies and robotic spiders but bosses who are actually characters and supervillains. This does mean even beyond the main plot there’s still things worth doing that don’t wear down the experience, but the extra content that isn’t in one of these more focused packs does lose its luster quite quickly so its longevity beyond structured stories and special missions is limited by the attempt to make A.I.M. robots and generic efforts to destroy A.I.M. resources the main focus.

THE VERDICT: Essentially, Marvel’s Avengers is going to be a question about how far into the game you want to get. The main story and the meaningful content additions, the PlayStation versions even including the web-slinging Spider-Man as a playable character, all provide a good amount of interesting play even though they rub up against repetitive robot foes and small glitches. The superheroes have diverse move sets for the most part and add a good deal to the variety, but the optional content begins to trudge through familiar territory and enemy types that needed more diversity to remain exciting. In essence, Marvel’s Avengers is a good game and some of the extra content is made with enough care to be worth checking out, but the small strain you experience in the well done personal journey of Kamala Khan becomes more pronounced if you dabble in the missions meant to make this game bigger than just that interesting story.

And so, I give Marvel’s Avengers for PlayStation 5…

A GOOD rating. A bit of a matter of diminishing returns, Marvel’s Avengers does have a lot of the elements of a fun single player adventure but then tries to spread that out into a multiplayer experience without the needed content breadth. Fighting those familiar robots is kept fresh in the story as you are playing as new heroes who handle them differently or a new part of the plot can frame things less as straightforward battles, the visually impressive chases where the world falls apart around you and you’re just barely avoiding instant deaths not at all present in the side content. That side content originally needed to rope in four players and keep them playing so that they might buy costumes eventually though, this live service model leading to a lot of missions that recycle enemies and areas not because there are new ideas for how to present them but just to keep you playing. The loot system and special goals push you towards doing these pretty basic ways of playing the game but not with such force that they distract from the better areas of the game. The hero-specific mission chains and post-release expansions give the game much more life because they add in personal stories and new enemies including ones that aren’t just robot variations. Having multiple heroes to build up and swap between can keep things interesting even when the A.I.M. forces become a bit stale though, and while there is some recycling even in the better structured content, Marvel’s Avengers is able to maintain an enjoyable level of play when you’re focused on the areas the designers clearly put more focus on. Weighing up how much of an impact extra optional content has on a game’s quality is a bit difficult, but the main journey of Marvel’s Avengers is good and there’s still enough worth playing after it that it shouldn’t be unfairly judged for its failure to find longevity after its core content.

Marvel’s Avengers would have definitely benefited from keeping its eyes on the story instead of trying to bend the experience into a long term multiplayer game. Kamala’s growth and reassembling the Avengers is an interesting angle for the adventure that isn’t just super-powered heroes going to stop bad guys, but the basic empty fighting of villains makes up a good amount of the content added to the game to try and make it something larger than a well crafted single player adventure. War for Wakanda does a good job of showing what could have been though, but unique content is certainly harder to make. Marvel’s Avengers could have just been a solidly designed adventure and made plenty based off the popularity of its brand, but Square Enix demanded Crystal Dynamics take it into a direction where it could conceivably earn tons of money but at the cost of some quality. It feels incongruous with itself when the main story is so focused and full of set pieces and special bosses while the missions are so broad and lacking in memorable moments, but despite the cynical reason for its bloat of content, the core and some secondary content still give you a game where the Avengers bring interesting combat styles to the table and the stories give you moments still worth experiencing.