But don’t worry, the game has a lot of long term value. Look at all nine resources at the bottom of the screen you need to collect to power up different kinds of equipment. But make sure you double back over any resource drop because it isn’t really clear how long it takes for drops to be able to be picked up or how close you need to be or when exactly they are officially picked up until you see it flying at you.
And don’t forget your Battle Pass Challenge Cards! You get a free one and probably ones you can buy too! To level up your card and unlock rewards make sure to do the two Daily Challenges and the two Weekly Challenges for your characters.
And I want to stress “for your characters”, because each character seems to have their own Challenge Cards and daily and weekly challenges for leveling up their cards. If that sounds like a lot of work you’re in luck because you can of course buy and spend premium currency to buy level skips on your challenge cards.
If you go to the Cosmetic section of the menu you can see all the skins for your character which all have associated rarities. And like modern games the “commons” are just recolors/re-skins while the “epic” and “legendary” rarities are the ones with large visual changes. Re-coloring is fine for super heroes because that can work for a lot of heroes who had minor suit alterations or color changes throughout comic history, but it still falls in line with how “skin progression” works in modern games.
If you find a collectable in an environment and complete sets of comic book covers you unlock permanent stat boosts. I guess that goofy but I don’t know that any part of it as an activity is interesting except for being able to look at old comic book covers.
Speaking of comic book history, there is a trove of Marvel grunts and villains a game can pull from to populate its enemy roster. And this game chose the most iconic ones. Who can ever forget
And the game’s excellent handling of the source material doesn’t end there. It’s got fantastic writing too that understands why these characters have become so popular.
So coming back to this.
I think if this were like an Ultimate Alliance spin-off or even a musou style game instead of a AAA GAAS vehicle, Crystal Dynamics probably could have focused on making a decent budget nu-God of War action game instead of this performance ridden mess of industry trends. I’d really like to see some games follow in Warframe’s footsteps and give you the ability to really play around with all of the stats that exist in the game and make unique and specialized builds that play around with all of the game systems instead of everything just swirling into optimal builds for The Raid.
I have to give credit where it’s due and say the latest patch for this weekend’s beta has actually improved things quite a bit, and all it really took was to remove the obnoxious amounts of screen shake and motion blur. Even with all the special effects the action is actually completely legible now which has done wonders for the overall game feel.
Now I actually can notice that the move effects have more differentiation than I thought before. I can note the effectiveness of a wide ranging move that trips enemies into the air versus a movie that causes lots of stun. I can actually see when an enemy is about to punch me so I can dodge it. This part could be because I jacked up the difficult so enemies don’t die as quickly but I can now tell that extended air combos do have practical use because I can see the damage being done to the enemies’ health that used to be obscured by screen shake and motion blur.
Structurally it’s the same game so all of the other problems of it just being a Destiny wannabe still apply, but I do have to give it credit that the combat system is now at least B-game quality. Which really isn’t really that bad a thing, to be honest! If the rest of the game were different I think I could dig it.
Note: I have only played Kamala/Ms. Marvel post-patch, whose moveset I think is mostly a ripoff of Luffy from One Piece Musou, so I don’t know if anyone else maybe feels just as bad as before.
If your attacks don’t make contact with the ground the screen shakes but there’s no noise. It’s just completely silent. It’s probably a lot of small seemingly minor decisions like this that gradually bring down the feel of a game’s combat. At least give me a whooshing sound.
This is weird to come back and say but I think the game’s marketing has actually done a disservice to it? I think all of the trailers and stuff showed the same cutscenes from the opening combat segment of the game and the beta just plopped you into giant empty combat arenas, so it felt like the single player was going to be kind of an afterthought after the grandiose opening tutorial. Like those kind of games where they try to find a way to use multiplayer content as single player campaign and it’s always so vapid. Those that have your characters say 'we gotta kill the bad guy" and then you’d play a regular multiplayer style mission with the occasional voice overs during combat.
But this has an actual story mode, with walking and talking- the most important element of a AAA single player game. The opening segment is Kamala and her dad walking around the Millennial Fair Avengers Festival. The game actually has some chill. There are a lot of cutscenes, and talking, the levels are regular linear level design. It’s not just multiplayer combat arenas.
Now, that’s not to say it’s particularly good. When I said linear level design, I mean these are mostly just holding forward so your run and do simple platforming while things chase you or happen around you with the occasional QTE. I haven’t actually had too much combat yet in the first couple of hours. Maybe it eventually develops some actual level design and not just plays like a AAA temple run.
But still, I was just really surprised this game is not just one of those games that tried to shoehorn a single player onto an MP focused framework. They made an actual single player mode.
P.S. This is all hypothetical of course. There’s no way I would have bought this game out of curiosity because it seemed like Western musou.
Also props to the devs for a while back announcing Hawkeye as the first DLC character and hyping him up with small bits of footage only to announce the first DLC character is actually Kate Bishop Hawkeye, with man Hawkeye just being a part of her story mode (though he is coming as a DLC character after her).
the more i think about this the more it feels like it actually is the perfect video game equivalent of the MCU movies
like, it is technically a video game in the same way that marvel movies are technically cinema, but in reality are an entirely different (and more cynical) kind of product
i have never seen such an astounding level of extraneous crap piled on top of a thing. also, after seeing multiple GAAS franchises burn up mid-flight it amazes me they thought that was the play for this license.
It probably made a lot more sense in 2015 or whenever it was the game started development. It looks like the first official teaser was in January 2017 but I remember there having been rumors of it for a long time before then. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be developing a AAA GAAS title and watching the dominant GAAS model shift multiple times in a couple of years. You need to constantly play catch-up to match whatever the newest trend is at the time.
I can’t figure out the best way to see the most recent appearance of characters because sites only list their first appearance. But apparently Blackheart was in a series called Champions last year and he now looks like this so I don’t think I want him anymore.
Spiral was in a series called Mr. and Mrs. X last year so she’s still around and looks about the same. I think Shuma Gorrath was in some Dr. Strange stuff too. So it’s not like they’re irrelevant anymore? I guess? But I don’t know how minor they are in the grand scheme of things.
Oh yeah, I also want to say, like, I knew the game starred a Pakistani American kid and I already know how great representation is and how much it affects people personally, but
It was still so weird hearing someone call her dad “abu” in a video game like this. And I kept going “why does this guy look so much like my uncle”, even though he really doesn’t and it was just due to the dearth of this kind of character from this particular region.
The curse of working in AAA game dev. You need to get one of those contraptions that lets you keep your joystick held in a single direction because you’re going to be going doing a lot of walking forward just for work.
