I wonder what the chances are Crystal Dynamics was still trying to figure out some of their core gameplay concepts by the time this got pushed out for release. It would explain why so much of the game design is at odds with itself, and also why there is so much contradictory help text.
When enemies attack you, they have a special effect to warn you that can be either blue, yellow, or red. As explained in one of the loading screen tips, you can dodge or parry blue and yellow attacks but red attacks can only be perfect dodged (dodging right before it hits you). With the way the game auto-scales it difficulty (which probably merits its own discussion as to whether this nullifies the entire purpose of increasing your stats), you’re mostly seeing yellow and red attacks. So the blue and yellow feel a bit redundant unless the yellow is there just to show you it might do more damage. If you have some sort of guard ability that drains your special meter, maybe the yellows drain more special meter?
But when you play the character tutorials, Kamala’s, Hulk’s, and Captain America’s tutorials specifically point out that red attacks can be countered using those character’s particular parry abilities. Black Widow, Thor, and Iron Man have their own parry/counter abilities, but their tutorials make no mention of them being able to be used against red attacks. So it feels like at some point the characters were getting classified based on whether or not they could parry the unblockable attacks. Basically some characters would have been effective at staying in close quarters even against strong enemies while some characters would be focused on ranged combat or evasive maneuvers.
But of course, that’s not how it actually works in the final game. No one can counter red attacks and every has to perfect dodge them regardless of their play style, as stated in that one loading screen tip. So this is obviously something that got changed recent enough that not even the character tutorials could be updated to reflect it. With the omni-presecence of red attacks some way to deal with them would definitely be useful, but maybe CD weren’t able to get it balanced such that it wasn’t blunting the threat of red attacks completely by the time they had to release the game.