Marvel Rivals (PC) review: 3 months later, how does the first Marvel hero shooter hold up?

Note: This review was first published on 7 March 2025.

Marvel Rivals is a hero shooter in the most literal sense. Currently featuring 37 of Marvel’s own superheroes in its roster, it's perhaps the most ambitious game to come out of the partnership between Marvel and developer and publisher NetEase Games. The game studio’s association with the genre stretches back to operating Blizzard’s Overwatch in China, and while it's not the only hero shooter that NetEase has released, it's certainly the one with the highest profile, currently sitting at #3 in Steam’s global top sellers list.

The accessibility of the game is helped by being free-to-play. And, for now at least, it remains truly so; the only micro-transactions in the game include cosmetics and its Battle Pass. I’ve been playing the game for about a month and a half now, and over the course of that time the game saw the launch of Season 1 (technically its second season), featuring the Marvel's First Family, the newly-added Fantastic Four. Let's take a look at how the game has fared so far.

An evergreen character list

The game is no doubt blessed by having a long-established and popular IP at its core. Marvel Rivals’s roster spans some of the most notable superheroes in Marvel’s catalogue to some rather obscure ones. You have well-known heroes like Spider-Man, Captain America and Iron Man, but the list also includes heroes that have only recently entered wider pop culture, such as Peni Parker and Star Lord. It also includes names like Jeff The Land Shark and Luna Snow, the latter of whom is a relatively new character even in Marvel’s multiverse.

This makes the task of introducing new heroes the game’s easiest. NetEase has nearly a century’s worth of characters to pull from, along with their respective powers. And it seems they're is quite receptive to current Marvel trends as well. Season 1 added the Fantastic Four, ahead of the new Fantastic Four: First Steps movie set to come out later this year. The fanservice potential isn't lost on them, either, though some of the character interactions are quite interesting; Magneto has unique dialogue with the mutants in the roster, but you'd never expect him and Luna Snow to talk to each other.

The game has the usual three character classes, Vanguard (tank), Duelist (damage/DPS), and Strategist (support). Characters share a base moveset with a basic attack, a special ability and an ult. But their complexity varies widely, and certain characters have barebones kits while others have abilities that require a bit of strategic play.

Take Jeff The Land Shark. His basic kit includes shoot-to-heal, shoot-to-damage, dropping healing items and a simple ult that snatches enemies and throws them off the map. Compare this with Loki, who has a special ability that allows you to place doppelgangers and swap positions with them, as well as an ultimate that allows him to transform into any other character in the match for 15 seconds.

It's interesting to observe this difference via the characters' moveset menu:

Speaking of diversity in complexity, there's a good mix in range between the characters as well. Melee characters include the Hulk and The Thing, while snipers include Hawkeye, Black Widow and Hela, among others. Most heroes, however, land as midrangers. Mobility also differs; Spider-Man and Iron Fist, for example, are incredibly quick and nimble, while Vanguards tend to be little bit bulkier. There's a good amount of flying characters as well.

The game has a star rating system to show how difficult a character is to play, but it’s not immediately obvious how it’s derived. Some, like The Thing (a 1-star) make sense at a glance as his skillset is fairly simplistic (get close and hit hard). But Hawkeye, who is another character with a pretty simple skillset (apart from his special ability to hit the enemy’s afterimages), is a 5-star. The star rating system seems more aligned to how hard it is to reach the skill ceiling for that specific character rather than how populated their moveset is.

Of course, characters are more complex than their movesets. Aside from coordinating support abilities to boost other characters, Team-ups make up another dimension of Marvel Rivals’s combat system. Team-ups are special abilities that are unlocked when two lore-relevant characters are on the same team, and while they can be useful, they’re not always mutually helpful.

Case in point, the Symbiote Bond Team-up requires Venom to be on the same team as either Peni Parker or Spider-Man, and through Venom’s symbiote, grants either one an ability that transforms them into a spiky ball that becomes a hazard on the field. However, while Peni and Spider-Man gain an extra ability with this Team-up, Venom does not.

Additionally, because of how Team-ups are portrayed as heroes sharing their power with each other, Team-ups with more than two characters require a specific hero for it to be triggered. In the same Symbiote Bond instance, having a Venom on the team is necessary; Peni Parker and Spider-Man don't have a Team-up on their own. This goes for some character pairings that would make sense but currently don't have a Team-up, like Loki and Thor.

Altogether, though, the game’s balance holds up fairly well. Some characters in the same skillset do have advantages over others; sniper mains might prefer Hawkeye over Black Widow because the former has more flexibility in close range, for example. But there is no specific character that breaks the game, and one-shots typically require some combination of support ability plus headshot, or through an ult. There are no insurmountable team comps either, at least none that the community has found yet. While I never experienced it personally, readers might remember the Overwatch GOATS comp of 3 tanks and 3 healers that caused frustration.

Quick matches & nice maps, but game modes can get stale quick

In terms of the actual game modes, though, this is perhaps one of the areas where you can tell the game is still new. Currently, Marvel Rivals's Quick Play and Competitive consists of three different modes:

• Domination, a ‘capture the area’ mode with a best-out-of-three point system,
• Convoy, where one team has to escort a vehicle to an endpoint while the opposing team tries to stop them,
• Convergence, a similar game mode, except requiring the escorting team to capture the mission area first before the vehicle can move.

All three have their match progress displayed by a progress bar, and are all team-based. And although each match doesn't usually last that long, the ability to contest the objective means a match can easily go on longer than 10 minutes if the skill between the two opposing teams are matched. Adding to the duration of a match is Overtime; if a losing team is still on objective, Overtime gives them extra time to contest it just before the winning team clinches victory.

You can’t choose which modes you want to play either, as that’s left up to matchmaking. There are 10 maps for these game modes right now, with each mode having corresponding maps; Domination has four, and Convoy and Convergence have three each. 

In terms of variety in different game modes, it's quite a weak point for the game. The duration of the matches makes the game pretty approachable for those looking for a quick gaming fix, but if you want to play for longer sessions, you might find yourself burned out fairly quickly as you rotate through the three game modes and their maps.

As for the maps themselves, their visuals are nice to look at. The moods of the map are well-expressed, from an apocalyptic version of New York City Empire of Eternal Night maps to the more well-lit Yggsgard and intergalactic Wakanda maps, with Tokyo 2099's neon glow somewhere in between. 

For gameplay, though, some maps are more fun to play than others. This may be an indictment of my sense of direction, but it takes me longer to navigate a map like Spider-Islands, which has a bunch of long corridors. The maps are also dynamic, with elements that are destructible and which reconstruct at different times. While it does create annoyances, like making sniper nests less viable in certain maps, it's the good kind of annoying that breaks up the flow of gameplay a bit.

It should also be mentioned that Arcade modes exist, too, though it’s less developed than the standard modes. There are only two Arcade modes, each with their own single map:

• Conquest, a deathmatch mode where players can collect points by defeating each other,
• Doom Match, a more standard deathmatch mode where the aim is to get the most amount of kills as possible (first six to get 16 kills, or if time runs out, the top 50% of players)

Both modes are free-for-all, compared to the team-based standard modes.

NetEase seems committed to adding new content outside of characters, as well. Season 1 added two new maps centred around New York City (another nod to the Fantastic Four), as well as the Doom Match arcade mode. There are also limited-time event modes; one example was the 3v3 football-like mode added in the first half of Season 1, as part of the game’s Chinese New Year theme at the time. 

But how often they'll add to the main game has yet to be determined. If it follows this pace, though, it may not be enough to keep interest. Judging from the length of Season 1, each season would last about three months. Waiting that long for two maps in the standard game modes, as well as the occasional new Arcade mode or event-based mode isn’t a good look for the game’s long-term popularity.

Micro-transactions, Battle Pass & Skins

Purchases in this game are done through three conveniently coloured in-game currencies: Units (blue), Chrono Tokens (purple) and Lattices (gold). Units and Chrono Tokens are purchasable through Lattices, but serve different purposes: Units are primarily used to unlock skins while Chrono Tokens are used to unlock items in the Battle Pass (as a result, they reset every season), and both can be earned through in-game activities such as achievements and dailies, or through Lattices.

As you’d expect then, Lattices can only be bought with real-world money. This can be done via direct purchases; the current exchange rate is about S$1 for 100 Lattices, but the more Lattices you buy, the lower the conversion rate. Lattices can also be unlocked via the Battle Pass. However, that requires purchasing the Luxury Battle Pass, which gatekeeps the more salient rewards behind a paywall (normal Battle Pass rewards include things like profile pics and character sprays), and which itself starts at 990 Lattices.

Overall, it’s the standard micro-transaction practice of hiding the goods behind multiple purchases and currency exchanges. I’m sure many already have opinions about that, and though I’d like to see more transparency, at least the items on offer are all cosmetics. And the skins, like the characters themselves, also pull from different sources of Marvel media:

Some of the recent TV shows and movies appear in the game through these skins, but they also pull from actual comics as well. And NetEase is rather liberal about whether these skins canonically belonged to their characters you're playing in the game; the VEN#m skin for Peni Parker and Chasm skin for Peter Parker's Spider-Man technically originate from separate characters, for example. This isn't a criticism, however, and it allows for more costuming options.

How does the game fare now, and what’s next?

Playing Marvel Rivals has been a pretty positive experience. I’m not a usual hero shooter player, but playing with friends and mastering a character has been a good source of fun and quick dopamine hits. It helps that the game’s visual design is quite colourful, which befits the diverse cast of characters it’s pulling from.

That said, I did start to taper off over the last few weeks. The main interest drain has mostly been the lack of variety in game modes, and the downward curve of engagement from the start to the end of the game session gets slightly steeper each time. I didn’t really take an interest in the Arcade modes as well, as I like the team-based aspect of the standard modes a little more, but that’s a preference issue. 

And just one more word on the in-game currencies, although you can get skins as a free-to-play player, it can be a bit of a slog to earn enough Units to unlock them. I’ve mentioned that I’m glad in-game currencies are mostly relegated to cosmetics, but if you keep returning to certain characters, looking at the same character model over and over again can get old too. 

Fundamentally, though, the game is solid. According to SteamDB, the player has remained steady at about 300,000 players across the past month, save for a spike on 22nd February when the Human Torch and The Thing were added. The matchmaking speed backs that up, too; on peak hours (after the working day), matchmaking rarely lasts longer than a minute.

NetEase seems to be pretty responsive to player feedback, too. This is anecdotal, but as someone who enjoys Black Widow’s simple gameplay style but has issues with her lacklustre melee abilities, I was quite surprised to see the developers address it sooner than I thought they would, recently adding a way to chain her ‘E’ kick ability to hit twice. 

But the game is just in its first season, and while I can see jumps in excitement in the future over the characters NetEast decides to add, game modes are another part of Marvel Rivals’s sustainability that NetEast hopefully develops on. The game still has a good outlook, though; the diversity of the game’s roster is its strongest point, and in a world after that's mostly cooling off on the MCU, it’s great to see them pulling characters from Marvel's wider multiverse. With more time and more seasons, it has the potential to be a hero shooter that people keep coming back to.

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