Marvel's Avengers is a disappointing and broken mess of a live-service game

Note: This review was first published on 28 Sept 2020.

This game should not have been released in this state. 

Marvel’s Avengers joins a frustratingly long list of broken Triple-A ‘live-service’ videogames, pushed out by developers with promises to fix bugs and add more playable content in the years to come. We’ve seen this before with Fallout 76, and it happened again with Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. Now, the loop begins anew with this superhero game from Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics. 

Don’t get me wrong - I really wanted to like this game. It’s packed full of easter eggs for every kind of Marvel fan, and translates these heroes’ abilities to gameplay in pretty spectacular form. Its combat and main story actually deliver some of my favourite moments in superhero games to date - but that’s when the game is actually functioning. 

Most of the time, I’d be lucky to complete a mission without the whole damn thing crashing on me. 

Let's talk about Earth's Mightiest Heroes

Marvel’s Avengers comes in two halves - the single-player story campaign and loot-driven multiplayer endgame. Developer Crystal Dynamics clearly wanted to make a superhero game that people could play for years by mashing these two things together, but the result is a bit of a mess. Let’s talk about the story first. 

The game kicks off with A-Day, where the Avengers celebrate the opening of their second headquarters in San Francisco. Things go awry when their helicarrier explodes, killing Captain America and unleashing Terrigen mist onto the city. This mist turns a portion of the city’s population into Inhumans, and the Avengers take the blame for it. The superhero team retires in disgrace, and the story picks up again five years later. 

After a science-based organisation named A.I.M. takes control of the city’s safety, a teenage Inhuman named Kamala Khan finds new information on the events of A-Day that might exonerate the Avengers. Armed with super-stretchy limbs and a highly valuable thumbdrive, she sets out to reassemble the Avengers. This leads into a roughly 12-14 hour story campaign where you watch the team slowly piece themselves back together. 

Honestly, Avengers’ story campaign actually lived up to the hype. It constantly doles out epic action and blockbuster setpieces with Uncharted-like finesse, in a wide range of environments using Avengers that feel distinctly powerful in their own ways. Gameplay varies from having the Avengers do simple tasks like gathering narrative MacGuffins to engaging in epic boss battles and chase sequences, and all of it is exciting enough to keep you glued to the controller for hours on end. 

Kamala Khan (AKA Ms. Marvel) was already a favourite of mine from her comics, and I sincerely doubt anyone’s walking away from this story without loving her too. Her relationship with each Avenger - Bruce Banner especially - brings out some really fun character dynamics in the team. She’s the heart of this game, and that is absolutely necessary - because the actual Avengers fall short by comparison. 

We’re introduced to each Avenger as they rejoin the team, in a couple of really cool missions designed to showcase each Avenger’s skillset. While we get to see plenty of Iron Man, the Hulk and Captain America, Black Widow and Thor are so absent in the story that I question their inclusion. Widow barely has a chance to make an impact in her short amount of screentime, and Thor just pops into the story with no introduction at all. It’s really strange that I came away from this game caring more about Ms. Marvel than any of the titular Avengers. 

 

Loot, loot, loot!

Alright, let’s talk about live-service games for a second. As more and more multiplayer games crop up in the market, developers have become hellbent on retaining as large a playerbase as possible, for as long as possible - so more people spend money on their games in the long-term. Sometimes, it’s not as insulting as it sounds. Overwatch, Fortnite and Warframe follow this formula, adding on great content over time with non-intrusive microtransactions. And then you have cases like Star Wars Battlefront 2’s. 

Marvel’s Avengers is a live-service game and unfortunately, it fits in the latter category. The story campaign serves as an introduction to the game’s core gameplay loop. You learn about character abilities, mission design, upgrading resources and loot - and then you take all that knowledge into the endgame. The idea here is that you take all your levelled up Avengers into endgame missions and spend the next few weeks maxing their Power Levels out, which is determined by loot. 

Games like Warframe and Destiny 2 thrive on making players grind for better loot ad infinitum, but Marvel’s Avengers has dropped the ball in a couple key ways here. First off, this loot system is terribly dull. In Warframe, you grind for new loot that gives your characters special abilities and bonuses that feel deeply impactful to gameplay. In Marvel’s Avengers, it’s a boring numbers game. You see something with a higher Power Level? Just equip it, and throw your old loot away. Tada, it’s that simple! Now go do that a billion times over the next 30 hours. 

Grinding for loot feels boring, because it simply doesn’t matter until loot starts dropping at Power Level 130 or above. That’s when stat buffs actually start to matter, but it’ll take you far too long to get there. Instead of tying loot and impactful abilities together like other games do, Marvel’s Avengers separates them. Now, all the abilities you need to make character builds go in each Avenger’s skill tree - and to be fair, they’re pretty amazing. 

Early on, I despised using characters like Thor and Iron Man, right until I unlocked powerful abilities that really opened up their potential in combat. These skill trees can change everything, but their removal from the loot game makes it feel tacked on. Honestly, why should I care about bumping up my heroes’ power level by a few digits? The only reward you get is access to level-gated endgame missions. Those missions aren’t even fun enough to look forward to, but we’ll get to that in a bit. 

I have no doubt in my mind that an Anthem 3.0-like overhaul is coming for this game’s loot system in the far-flung future. Currently however, it just feels like an excuse for Crystal Dynamics to keep people playing for years on end. And why should they? For the high-priced microtransactions, of course. Player matchmaking might be completely broken right now, but you can hop on and buy character skins with no problem. Priorities!

Combat is great, but also kinda bad?

Look, I actually did like some parts of this game. While Crystal Dynamics failed in making a good live-service game, I think they got really close to making a great action game. Combat in this game is just as fun and flashy as one would expect when playing as the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Each Avenger feels like they belong in a game of their own - and the developers were smart enough to introduce open-world environments to accommodate that. 

Taking control of Iron Man and firing lasers and rockets before jetting off into the sky feels fantastic. Tossing out a shield as Captain America and kicking it back when it returns to you is so good. Pulling out twin machine guns as Black Widow and going ham on a couple robots feels satisfying. But doing all this in tandem with your fellow Avengers as they bring the pain to A.I.M.’s forces is almost priceless. 

Every character feels great to play and control, especially in combat. As you level up your heroes, skill trees offer a great deal of character building options to make them your own. These abilities are important, and you’ll find that each Avenger becomes almost unrecognisable when making the climb from just Level 1 to Level 20. Combat itself feels very reminiscent of God of War, allowing you to use a wide array of abilities while blocking and dodging away from enemy attacks. 

Now, we get into more bad stuff. While each character’s kit feels well-tuned, combat scenarios and mission design is not. The enemies you fight against here are just so…uninspired. This is a universe full of memorable heroes and villains, with multiple armies of humans and creatures you could’ve had the Avengers fight against - and Crystal Dynamics chose robots? You’re just fighting robots and humanoid ‘synthoids’ when you’re not fighting humans in yellow hazmat suits, and I can’t help but lament what a missed opportunity that was after 30 whole hours of fighting these things. 

There is, at the very least, good variety in how these enemies are designed - but they’re simply not tuned right. The Avengers are strong, but Crystal Dynamics might've oversteered in designing challenging enemies for them to fight. The resulting combat scenarios can only be described as infuriating - with a combination of projectile spam, Christmas light-like particle effects, braindead team AI, hitscan enemies and stagger attacks all coming together in the worst way possible. Game balancing is just screwed up right now in so many ways, and that problem has prevailed weeks after launch. 

Also, how do you make an Avengers game with just Abomination, Modok and Taskmaster as villains? Even Marvel’s Spider-Man had more villains than that, come on now.

Level design and supreme brokenness

Mission and level design gets incredibly dull the longer you play the game. At first, every mission feels shiny and new, taking you to cool-looking environments around the world. That excitement wanes when you realise how repetitive mission design can be, usually having you either take control points, kill a couple enemies or destroy things. Environments are incredibly dull, as well. There are only a few open-world environments (called ‘drop zones’), and you’ll have seen most of them by the time the story ends. Most of them simply lack flavour. I’ve been in so many bland deserts and A.I.M. labs that I simply don’t want to return to the game until there’s something actually new to see. There’s nothing to do in these environments, besides the same old boring missions. 

Finally, I want to reiterate something I’ve said before: this game was not ready for release. In my time with Marvel’s Avengers, I have encountered a truly horrendous amount of bugs and glitches. Far, far more than any game should have at launch. During cutscenes, the framerate dropped to 2 to 3fps sometimes, with characters bumbling around like they were on puppet strings. I kept getting notifications to collect vendor rewards during cutscenes. Conversation options for characters would disappear when I got close to them. 

A vendor would say, “Seriously? You’re the best,” on repeat after talking to her, even if I was in a different room. Mission objectives would not trigger and leave me stuck running around, only fixable when I reloaded a checkpoint. Characters would yell at each other in an enclosed space. The framerate tanked whenever too many enemies filled the screen. The game crashed on me multiple times. I would join a game, and fall through the game map. I’ve encountered infinite loading screens. I died multiple times during the final bossfight, because I felt like I was wading through sludge… due to the abysmal framerate. 

You get the idea. This game is broken, and it feels like Square Enix has managed to dupe millions of players around the world into becoming Quality Assurance testers. Marvel’s Avengers was in no state for release, and it’s an embarrassment that it came out anyway. Just two weeks after launch, the game received a patch that fixed over 1,000 issues. Why did it launch with these issues in the first place? 

Verdict

I can't even say that Marvel’s Avengers is a mixed bag. The bag has been cut open, and everything inside is spilling out. Sure, it nails that childlike feeling of playing as Thor and splitting the skies open with lightning. Its story campaign feels great to play through, with Uncharted-like action and a likeable lead in Kamala Khan. The amount of love and care that went into crafting the in-game lore and character skins is obvious.

But this game drops the ball on everything else. It’s a multiplayer game, but I only managed to match with real players four or five times in an entire month’s worth of playtime. The loot-driven gameplay is fundamentally flawed, and results in a boring and grindy gameplay loop. Its enemies and environments are so uninspired, that it makes me wonder how its developers could look at Marvel Comics and come away thinking, “Robots are cool!” So much of the game is infested with bugs, glitches and more technical nonsense that makes it feel months away from a stable release. 

Games like these - Warframe, Destiny 2, Star Wars Battlefront 2 and more, launched horribly and grew to become critically-acclaimed titles later on. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that Marvel’s Avengers hasn’t hit the mark on release. Maybe down the line, it’ll turn into a great game with flawless multiplayer and tons of fun content to play through. Who knows? Right now though, it’s just a mess. Wait for a deep sale. 

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