Captain America and the Avengers (NES)

In the arcade, Captain America and the Avengers is a tilted plane beat ’em up where up to four players can team up and fight quite a range of unique supervillains. However, a 1991 arcade game could do a lot more than the aging Nintendo Entertainment System, and so a great deal of changes were made for its NES counterpart. Now, Captain America and the Avengers is a side-scrolling platformer, the only multiplayer involves one on one fights, and perhaps strangest of all, there are only two playable heroes, the archer Hawkeye the only Avenger to truly join the shield-slinging Captain America on this rather different adventure.

 

While the box proudly displays the Marvel heroes Vision and Iron Man alongside Captain America and Hawkeye, they’re actually the hostages this game’s story is based around. The Mandarin, bearing his short-lived blue and silver samurai armor, managed to knock out Iron Man and Vision, holding them captive in Avengers Park over on the United States’s west coast. However, Captain America and Hawkeye are kept away by a country-wide attack, the heroes first drawn to Charleston as other villains like the Wizard and Ultron are collaborating not just with The Mandarin, but their true leader, the Red Skull. While the Red Skull takes some time to be acknowledged as the true villain in the game itself, the manual is quick to give it away, and weirdly enough, the back of the box mentions all the major supervillains save the Mandarin who the game almost sets up as the main villain initially. Besides the exact nature of how you confront the Red Skull near the end though, there’s not much to spoil, most of your focus instead on moving through major cities in the U.S. like New Orleans, Phoenix, and Denver as well as some smaller choices like Boise,  Montgomery, and Omaha. However, even a city like Las Vegas is going to look pretty similar to the other areas you visit, these more just names to make it sound like you’re on a cross-country fight against evil rather than replaying the same few level formats of cities, watery forests, and interior bases.

While Captain America and the Avengers lets you play as both Captain America and Hawkeye, initially the two are separately moving through America. Clearing out cities one by one, you can eventually get them to join up and earn the ability to pause and swap between them as often as needed during a stage, something that proves to be pretty useful since they both have their own health bars and fight fairly differently. Captain America can throw his star-spangled shield in front of him, but it needs time to return like a boomerang. He can at least punch while he’s waiting for the shield to return and has a midair kick and charging tackle as well, but while he is the stronger hero, he’s the less flexible one. Hawkeye’s arrows can be aimed upwards and diagonally in addition to ahead, and he can fire his arrows freely while in the air as well. He can punch if you try to attack while an arrow is still flying, but he’s much better at hitting foes from afar or at tricky angles. Captain America has some situational special abilities though, able to hang from pipes and also lower his shield to protect him from landing on spikes, but rather than being a nifty reason to whip him out, it can sometimes lead to a bothersome pause and swap for a jump, and if you don’t have both heroes together, some parts of the level are basically inaccessible. If one of your heroes dies you can use the other to bring them back, but if they both go down, it’s game over.

 

While there are many technically optional levels in Captain America and the Avengers because you often have split paths across the country map, you’ll quickly find that visiting them all is only inviting more repetition in an already repetitive game. During a typical stage, playing as either hero might not go so badly during most moments. Regular enemies can sometimes charge you a bit quickly or move in tricky ways as they open fire, but there are moments of decent action platforming. However, as the difficulty increases and you start seeing the same three level archetypes repeat, you’re not only made more likely to die as foes hit harder or come in greater numbers, but you’re not even seeing much new as you push through these tougher stages. To clear a level you must first find one of its Key Crystals, these hidden inside inexplicable floating capsules attached to the background even when it’s open air instead of something reasonable like a stone wall or tree. Many of these capsules instead hold collectibles like points items or Power Crystals. Power Crystals not only expand life bars, but they’ll make the heroes hit harder too, although they’re not so common that you’re likely to earn these upgrades unless you scour stages and take on some optional cities. Unfortunately, while you can increase your total life amount eventually, Captain America and the Avengers decides to hide the true value of your health by making it only clear on the pause screen. During the action, instead the top left of the screen will usually show 1 to 3 red ovals. These are meant to represent some amount of your remaining life, but it’s hard to determine how much. Having 2 might mean you are just a single notch above 1 or a single notch below 3 with plenty of notches in between. Later foes can start dealing nearly an entire oval’s worth of damage, but it might not show because it didn’t deal the odd amount needed to remove the indicator, making it harder to really gauge how much life you have at any one moment.

Health pick-ups aren’t overly rare at least, and while levels can sometimes be rather large and require exploring in many directions to eventually find the exit and the crystal, there can be moments of action that test you in interesting ways or ask you to think a bit about how you’re fighting or exploring. It doesn’t make up for the rough life system or how many levels feel like they’re lightly altered variants just with harder hitting foes, but what pushes Captain America and the Avengers into grueling territory is its bosses. There are only five supervillain bosses on the roster, and they’re actually saved for special encounters so at first that may not sound so bad. However, each boss fight drags on and on, especially ones like Ultron who fly around the screen so you either need to wait for the brief moment where Captain America can reasonably hit him or slowly whittle him down with arrows as Hawkeye. Almost every boss fight ends up a slog despite showing most everything they can do in the first few seconds of the encounter, and while Crossbones at least gets in close and shifts up his strategy based on your position, the others tend to loop the same techniques and it would be harder not to figure out their pattern eventually. At the same time, it’s such a time commitment you might eventually miss the timing and take a hit, these simplistic bosses perhaps made this way since over in multiplayer, player two can play as a few of the villains and fight player one as one of the two heroes.

 

Where things get really tedious though are the miniboss encounters. While the supervillains take way too long to wear down, the minibosses are a bit faster but much more abundant. Time and time again you’ll have to stop exploring a level to fight these overly familiar fiends. Fire Man and Dynamite Napalm are two bosses you’ll fight in the exact same way, often back to back, sometimes multiple times in a level. They can have moments with tricky jump spacing or attack timing to also try and make you slip up. If it was just trying to make sure you didn’t miss unique content by having these guys crop up in a few places in case you take a different route across America that would be one thing, but it is inevitable you will encounter these mid-bosses far too frequently, with almost any moment where you encounter a foe who can survive an arrow or two likely to be a drag since usually they just ask you to do the same attacks over and over until one side of the conflict finally ends up dead.

THE VERDICT: During its standard action, Captain America and the Avengers can sometimes make playing as its two heroes a bit interesting, at least before the levels start feeling more and more cookie-cutter and start leaning one the same midbosses encounters far too often. What starts as early interesting difficulty becomes aggravating monotony as the imprecise health indicator makes it hard to know how safe you are in the midst of heavy action, but most strong foes already have their fights drag on because they utilize a pretty plain pattern that you must slip into the rhythm of or die for flubbing your timing. When you can alternate between Captain America and Hawkeye, their power mix can make level navigation a bit more stimulating, but it’s not going to make up for the slow skirmishes that pull your attention back to the same old fights again and again.

 

And so, I give Captain America and the Avengers for the Nintendo Entertainment System…

A TERRIBLE rating. As nifty as real cities on a map of the U.S.A. can be for a level select screen, it doesn’t really feel like it benefits the game beyond that initial impression. If it was a more linear adventure, perhaps more level themes and a lot less repeated content could have carried the adventure, the game’s midbosses not good enough to warrant so many appearances either. A first encounter with a tough foe or getting locked in with a flood of enemies can apply some decent pressure without it having to happen as often as it does, the game certainly difficult enough already thanks to a needlessly unclear health system. Considering the pause screen shows more details, it’s a bit strange the game didn’t just have a bar always visible, it not like the repeated level backdrops needed to show off their pixel art that much that a bit of screen real estate couldn’t be sacrificed. Boss fights certainly can drag on if you haven’t had luck with power crystals or they fly around too often, and those power sets don’t even transfer to multiplayer the best since the flyers can gain quite the edge against the heroes. There are singular stages in Captain America and the Avengers that work well enough and maybe even try something a bit new like climbing scaffolding instead of walking past the same few buildings as always, but you might not even see them if you don’t go down the right path and instead get fed something you’ve already seen before. While there are some stiffer parts like Captain America not being as flexible against flying foes or needing to pause and swap sometimes to do something as simple as grab a pipe and leap onto a platform, the heroes feel distinct and have their advantages so they could have been sufficient stars of an action platformer. Instead, you’ll be worn down by the difficulty or the repeated fights to the point you might not want to put in the work to save Vision and Iron Man after all.

 

There are some good bones behind the basics of Captain America and the Avengers on the NES, and regular stages can make decent use of them. The problem with level and enemy design though is they settle into ruts and keep trotting out the same ideas rather than keeping up the effective early use. There are optional levels not because it helps the game but because it probably wasn’t too hard to keep executing the same formula. While beat ’em ups can often be accused of being repetitive, the arcade counterpart to Captain America and the Avengers moved quickly to new ideas constantly and barely let you fight regular baddies long enough for it to have a chance of getting stale. Conversely, Captain America and the Avengers on the NES soaks in the same platforming stage concepts and boss designs, it growing far more monotonous than even standard brawlers because even they have the good sense to speed up repeat encounters. An interesting effort to bring the game home even though it wouldn’t work on the hardware, this NES superhero game unfortunately disappoints even if you know you’re in for a very different time from the arcade beat ’em up of the same name.