‘Avengers’ Cosmic Gear, new SHIELD base and tachyon faults: a review

Well i have spend an hour replaying the new Avengers content that was released today, which contained some snippets of the “story” in the form of a short scene with Maria Hill entering SHIELD’s new base, Substation Zero, which was released alongside the new missions from Tachyon Rift today.

There are some kind of weird “weather storms”, and these missions are how we collect data on them. What this is for and if this leads to Kate Bishop / Hawkeye stuff, I don’t know, but I hope so.

Substation Zero is an impressively built new zone, although I’m still somewhat puzzled as to why it exists. It shares the same vendors as the Helicarrier and so far doesn’t seem to offer anything new except maybe an Easter egg or two, so it’s not really clear to me why Maria Hill couldn’t come to our original base. Maybe it will serve some greater purpose in the future, but for now it’s just … a nice place, I guess.

The “meat” of this update is the Tachyon Rift missions that are sure to be controversial, I imagine. They are essentially “reskins” of existing missions. One of the two available I played today was a replay of a Black Widow chain mission I did a month ago.

There are three modifiers in play here that make them much more challenging than traditional missions:

– All enemies have “elite team” style shields that make them much more tank until you break them.

– You will constantly lose health, which means that you will have to use your combat skills, takedowns or flasks of willpower to regain health while playing, but it is not. that serious. Strangely, the continuous damage effect was constantly activating the Jarvis barrier on my Thor, practically rendering him immune at all times.

– Finally, the mission has a timer. There are small circles that will appear around the map that will add 5 to 20 seconds to the clock and if it reaches zero, you will fail. What this means in practice is that you will probably have to drop the fights to fly around the map and collect them quite frequently. On the map with other players I found out that this was constantly my job as Thor, a pilot, as my teammates didn’t seem bothered at all with the timer.

Ultimately, the reward for these missions is access to Cosmic Gear, a new type of elemental damage that causes enemies to take more damage and heals you once activated. I don’t have enough cosmic gear to know how good this item is yet, but sounds good. It seems that only the reward at the end of the mission grants it, and I got two pieces for two missions. These missions also seem to have replaced the priority missions of the week, which seems like an extremely bad decision.

The second mission, Widow’s, was much more difficult and the game wouldn’t let me use my AI gear, just a matched team (which still had AI filling the last slot at the end). I got 80% clarity on that because my teammates died a few times and I only finished the race with a Cosmic Epic that wasn’t very good. I have heard of some people who have gone exotic, but I was not so lucky.

While the cosmic gear seems like a nice addition to the game, I’m less sure how the community will take A) the missions are new modifiers on old missions B) the enemies are so annoying and uncomfortable to fight with these shields and C) the mission is on a timer. In fact, I didn’t mind the health degeneration, as it makes you play creatively, but juggle that Y the timer Y these crazy enemies was more annoying than funny. If you’re looking for a great new reason to return to Avengers, while this might be a “diversifying” addition to the quest list, I don’t think much is being added in the end.

I want to get some more cosmic gear and I know there is Tachyon Rift specific gear that could make these missions a little more enjoyable, but for now I’m not … too impressed by them. I’d rather go run the Hives which are now guaranteed to get me exotics after yesterday’s patch, but I guess I’ll try some other glitches when the War Table adds more later.

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