Movie magic turns to dust thanks to an uninspired routine

A The cooperative gameplay starring Earth’s Mightiest Heroes seems like a no-brainer, especially when it’s being developed by Crystal Dynamics and Eidos Montreal, two studios that know upside down character action games. Still Marvel Avengers it’s half-done and harbors a brutal identity crisis, which feels like an avoidable consequence of the game’s deceptive messages.

As is standard in modern big budget multiplayer titles, Marvel Avengers is a service game, a “living” project that unfolds over the years with new stories, characters, and features in development. However, the ace up its sleeve is that it also offers a nuanced, character-driven campaign with super-scripted sequences that could be presented as your own experience.

This feels like a chocolate peanut butter situation. Players are growing weary of the service game model and yearn for substance and consequences – they want narratives that mean something within a framework that allows them to socialize and play with their friends.

The game was heralded as a great unifier of these two genres, but the execution of this courageous ambition is ultimately divisive. There’s too much peanut butter in the single-player chocolate serving game, so to speak. In the campaign, you play as Kamala Khan, a superbly written female lead, played with emotion and flair by Sandra Saad.

At times, he was truly stifled by encouraging her to succeed against AIM, the antagonistic force that was trying to exterminate the “inhuman disease” that gave Khan his abilities. At around eight hours, it’s a great story with some interesting twists and turns that does a good job of making you feel like an Avenger. Mission accomplished, in that department.

Yet despite all the incredible campaign pieces and heartfelt moments, he never really manages to shake his service play framework, which lingers in the narrative like a bad smell. There’s this promising scene where Thor makes his big comeback after a long hiatus, using Mjölnir to do a short job of an AIM Warbot.

However, as the God of Thunder crushes his helmet and the player takes over, you watch the robot chassis crumble into GaaS cannon fodder, with colored loot balloons and some of the game’s many maddening resources shot out. air like tephra from a volcano. Suddenly, the magic of the movie is gone and I’m grounded for the routine that awaits me.

This problem spoils many of the best moments in the game. You’ll play through a fantastic scripted mission in which you’ll escape from a collapsing space station, only to then be thrown onto an overwhelmingly boring multiplayer map to “find protocols,” activate elevators, and battle wave after thankless wave of robots. Then when you’re done with that, the game will hit you with an emotional scene out of nowhere that has by no means been earned, a jarring aside that comes after hours of disjointed work.

The tonal lash is amazing; the disparity between good campaign missions and the obvious filler is something to behold. This also extends to boss fights. Beyond the three or four villains to fight, the game loves to place several robots of increasing size in front of the player, asking them to squeeze the sponge lazily.

PMany of the maps don’t look like authentic locations either. They just feel like enclosed baby service playgrounds for superheroes, with random jumping platforms, puzzles, and optional patrols to participate in. A glitch in one of the game’s final scenes caused the social space war table icons to appear in the background while The Avengers were having a heartfelt moment. Alright, I thought …

The game seems to be constantly preparing you for hard work, and once you get there, it’s hard work. Playing the multiplayer mode of the Avengers Initiative in co-op can be fun, especially when you’re following one of the iconic quest chains, which delves into the backstory of a particular character. Thor’s Mjölnir feels amazing to control so I’ve focused on it, but after two miserable missions the promising sub-narrative ended and I had to go back and be bored to death doing boring drop zones.

On an endorphin-based level, watching the numbers rise and developing your skill tree to make your Avenger stronger feels good, but doubt about the meaning of your playtime inevitably begins to appear. I’ve made it all the way to part of the endgame content, hoping that it will eventually hand out the goods, but I keep completing the same old objectives in familiar hallways, moving from mission to mission to follow meaningless data packets and clues. of villains, fighting “clones” of bosses from the main game. For such an ambitious game, the routine lacks inspiration.

The most frustrating part of all this is that combat is so much fun. The game moment by moment of Marvel Avengers it’s fluid and each hero feels like a highlight of the last decade of character action games. I love pinning enemies to the walls with Mjölnir and wailing them with my fists, then throwing the hammer from afar and slamming it into a crowd of enemies. The developers have really thought about and defined how each Avenger should feel, and I would play a separate campaign with a full script that focuses on each of them.

ANDet I am disappointed in how badly they harmonize with each other. Black Widow’s campaign mission describes her as a stealthy character who excels in underground combat, but that approach is ridiculously impossible in the open-world multiplayer, especially with The Incredible Bloody Hulk by your side.

Even in four-player co-op, I rarely found it necessary to communicate with my teammates about the situation at hand. Most of the time, you can only press buttons alone and the forgettable robot hordes will be consumed. The campaign is all about reuniting The Avengers, but in multiplayer I rarely feel like part of a team.

I wrote in my beta preview that I would like to specialize my Avenger so they are not the same as everyone else online, and that is still kind of a pipe dream at launch. Much of the problem is due to the fact that the loot is not modular. You only have cosmetic skins that change the appearance of the characters, instead of specific visible armor pieces for different parts of the body. In a service game like this, it’s all about concrete boots.

Marvel Avengers has definitely learned from DestinationHowever, it has not accepted some of its most important innovations. Nobody cares about mindless loot! I spend a lot of time in the pause menu pressing X and pressing Y to update and dismantle forgettable items that are replaced within an hour.

This approach exhausts the full potential of the game for cooler moments. Given the lack of incentives to communicate and the fact that players don’t interact very well, you never feel like that loot or skill you’ve worked on has saved the day.

Problems become existential when the meaningless ending is considered. Where do we go from here? There are raids and mega hives that are repeat targets. I love playing as Thor, but I can’t take any more button-mashing monotony, so it’s hard to get to the level cap.

We have come this far without talking about the fact that Marvel Avengers it is riddled with flaws. The game looks amazing and plays smoothly when you actually manage to get into a match, but just joining your friends’ game can be a nightmare.

I encountered tons of issues where my friend disappeared during loading screens or the game crashed when jumping between outposts, forcing us to a black screen and occasionally sending us to the Task Manager to end the process manually.

When we do, we may have two of the same hero on our side or the back door we entered could be wide open, allowing us to explore the downloaded map, with randomly closing doors and enemies. important that enemies make inaccessible. architecture.

Even in the campaign, there were situations where I would appear in the next area and find myself below the map. Multiplayer vendors will repeat the same line indefinitely, and the UI can trick you into tricky in-game menus as the mission loads. Captions don’t line up with text at times, voice lines get clipped or give standard responses, and character models can freak out when you least expect it, with visual artifacts getting in the way of your goals. It’s very clear that this game needed a lot more time in the oven.

Marvel’s Avengers is out now for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Google Stadia.