Marvel’s Avengers
PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, Xbox Series
The comic book industry has long divvied up its own history over a Golden Age, a Silver Age, and then, perhaps realising where this pattern would end up, a ‘Modern Age’ that began in the 1980s and remains ongoing. Such designations now seem almost quaint next to the cinematic age of the superhero which, over the last decade in particular, has dominated the box office and recently culminated in the highestgrossing film of all time. The mass market has never loved spandex more and, with Hollywood conquered, games are the next medium in line.
Marvel’s Avengers is far from the first Marvel videogame, and is not even the vanguard for this new age of mega-budget would-be blockbusters (that would be 2018’s excellent Marvel’s Spider-Man). It owes a debt to the knockabout Marvel Ultimate Alliance series, as well as Rocksteady’s Arkham games. But be under no illusions, true believers: this has ambitions beyond any superhero game in history.
So, as Cap shields his eyes and looks out across one of this world’s glorious, verdant vistas, the sun shines down on a service game. Marvel’s Avengers is a weird experience, and the first part of that feeling comes from a campaign which is by turns exhilarating and dull, then turns out to have borne little relation to what you’ll be doing in multiplayer. This is not an inherently bad idea. The singleplayer campaign opens with a well-executed sequence that introduces the Avengers, with no little charm, through the eyes of Kamala Khan, who in this opening is a fan but will soon become the story’s focus. As things inevitably go wrong, you’re shuffled between Avengers and given control for brief-but-bravura action sequences, and there’s a big bang at the end.
We pick up five years later and, as the new
Ms. Marvel, start about reuniting the original five Avengers. This involves a mix of heavily on-rails platforming, a bit of fighting, plenty of cutscenes, and a hugely disappointing lineup of villains. By our count, there are three bona-fide supervillains in this game (Taskmaste, Abomination and Modok), while various other bosses are humans in mech suits, giant robots or, if you’re really lucky, a hovering robot warship.
When you consider the history of the Avengers this seems incredible. Marvel’s Spider-Man understood that, while you might have Doctor Octopus cackling away throughout the campaign, it was important to give players a procession of colourful B-listers on the way to him. Going by the combat experience of Marvel’s Avengers, Captain America’s deadliest opponents are the flame vents on big robots. Sega’s awful PS3-era Iron Man game had a better selection of supervillains.
What saves Marvel’s Avengers, just about, is the team itself, several high-energy set-pieces, and a combat system that has flaws but also serious potential. The six team members (unlocked by completing the campaign) all feel distinctive, with the brawling high-impact style of Captain America a world away from the hoverdiveslam-rockets loops of Iron Man. With both the latter hero and Thor, one of the areas that deserves particular credit is flight – perhaps the most iconic of all superpowers, but also one that games have had enormous trouble realising in the past. This isn’t perfect: there’s a relatively low ceiling, the transition from hovering to moving forwards feels a little awkward, and your top speed is not fast enough. But those nitpicks remain just that, because flying works. There’s a wonderful frisson when you notice a teammate in trouble and, over breathless seconds, arc bodily over the battlefield and slam down to help in a burst of lightning.
This has ambitions beyond any superhero game in history
All characters, with the exception of the rather plodding Hulk, have something in their core moveset that the others don’t: whether that’s the stretchy crowd control of Ms. Marvel and the sheer joy of whomping something with a giant boot in mid-air, or Black Widow’s Dante-esque pistols, which are stuffed with ammo and empty just as fast as you can pull the trigger. Each also has their own extensive skill tree that is largely to be explored in multiplayer, which builds out a basic moveset quickly before requiring players to specialise across three skills that can reach ludicrous levels of power.
The combat basics are a light/heavy attack combo system, a time-slowing dodge, a parry, lavishlyanimated finishers on stunned enemies, and (mostly excellent) special moves. We’re not in the land of Platinum Games here, but the enemy animations are readable, the timings and audio cues are precise, and the emphasis is on the player characters fighting lots of enemies at once. To that end, most characters’ ultimate attacks will shred through everything outside of bosses, and you almost feel sorry for some enemy mobs as they shatter beneath a bunch of pent-up specials. The excess here is the right call, letting players feel overpowered for a brief period and shimmering a little stardust over the moment-to-moment brawling.
Almost. The combat’s biggest failing is a camera that doesn’t know whether it wants traditional shoulder shots or wide views which, combined with a lock-on that’s never in a hurry to move anywhere, forces the player into a lot of manual readjustments and sweeps. After some parameter-fiddling in the options menu the general experience can be made a little smoother, but close-up transitions to finishing moves regularly serve up a clippy mess, and getting caught with your back against the wall usually sees things go haywire.
Zooming out to the bigger picture ourselves, one of the odd moments in Avengers comes after the team reassembles, which is when you realise the core of the game is wildly different from what you’ve spent the last
dozen hours doing. This activity consists of large-ish but simple open-world maps, filled with robot clusters and loot boxes, around which you tear in a team of four. Straight-up fights come alongside missions that require you control a given point, or destroy a particular object, but this is about one thing: the repeated application of Avenging boots to countless thousands of robotic behinds, over and over, with no Excelsior in sight. What makes this work on repeat is multiplayer, once again, amping-up the spectacle and your enjoyment of it.
Where in the campaign these moments are more scripted, here they emerge amidst chaos, and are all the more rewarding for it. At times, this seems like brilliant fun, and it’s always when the player’s fighting their own fight but can see Hulk go crackers in the background on another lot, while Iron Man shoots overhead and Ms. Marvel stomps around at five times her usual size slapping baddies about like wet sourdough.
This side of Avengers can be pure fun, but the endgame is nevertheless half-baked. The loot system is utterly unremarkable and links to the action in inconsequential ways (see Post Script). Much more concerning is that, played a few weeks after release, Avengers is an unreliable online experience with a tendency to either go completely on the fritz for hours or drop players mid-game. We spend an hour trying to enter a lobby with a friend, to no avail. On other evenings, it works for a couple of hours, then simply disbands a strike team with no warning. All of which would be less irritating if the loading times weren’t so painfully long. It’s inevitable that Avengers will improve in this area, but at times it simply falls apart.
There’s an aspect to games like Avengers – the type with multi-year ambitions, where the initial product undergoes a radical transformation over its early months or years as a live game. You can get even more extreme: recent examples like EA’s Anthem, Amazon’s Crucible, or even Valve’s Artifact have been withdrawn from the market entirely to undergo re-development. While Avengers is not in that wheelhouse, it does feel like this will be a much better game in a year. There’s the foundation of a decent multiplayer brawler, but not much else atop that, and the sheer repetition begins to rapidly pall. The villain problem begins to rear its head again, with few missions that truly feel like events. The Avengers are supposed to be the world’s greatest superheroes but, as you smash through yet another wave of robots, we long for the kind of foil that could make them feel like that. More robots with bigger health bars is all players get.
Marvel’s Avengers has a lot of good parts, a lot of indifferent ones, and an overall lack of direction. The long-term question is where multiplayer goes from here because, as things stand, this won’t be giving Bungie any sleepless nights. The more immediate one for would-be Avengers is whether you’re willing to meet the game halfway. If you want a decent singleplayer campaign with big explosions and sharp writing, this delivers. If you like the idea of playing a multiplayer superhero brawler with these characters, then some of the time, this is your game. But key elements are all over the place. If you want some sort of MCU-as-aservice game, this ain’t it. Maybe one day – but right now this superhero sandbox comes with far too much assembly required.