Marvel's Avengers Review

 

SYNOPSIS

Marvel’s Avengers begins at A-Day, where Captain America, Iron Man, the Hulk, Black Widow, and Thor are unveiling a new, hi-tech Avengers Headquarters in San Francisco. The celebration turns deadly when a mysterious enemy causes a catastrophic accident which results in massive devastation. Blamed for the tragedy, the Avengers disband. Five years later, with all Super Heroes outlawed and the world in peril, a sprawling adventure ignites when a determined young woman named Kamala Khan sets out to reassemble and rebuild the Avengers to stop the unchecked power of the secretive new force known as AIM.

REVIEW

This has been one of the games that I’ve been looking forward to coming out, mainly because I love the Marvel universe. To be honest, who wouldn’t want to be playing in a massive world as their favourite Avenger?

Now, the only thing that was playing on my mind about this game was the fact of how much we were seeing of it. We had seen part of the opening sequence (Golden gate bridge) quite a few times, but there wasn’t really much else floating around. Square Enix were holding war tables and letting us know bits here and there about the game, but in terms of gameplay it was really only the opening sequence that we got to see in detail.

Fast forward to launch day and getting my hands on it, well, I say launch day, I had early access to it from my Deluxe Edition and after playing the opening sequence I was hooked, I loved how the controls felt and how each different Avenger played.

The first thing that I was to talk about is the story, it is an absolutely fantastic original story and the voice acting is to be commended. The only problem that I had with it was that it seemed to end quite abruptly, I know there are times where you feel that the story drags out and you want it to end, but this did seem to get to the last mission rather quickly. I’m not going to post spoilers about the story, as at this time, that wouldn’t be fair, but the pacing to start with was good, you get into the meat of the bones and suddenly I found myself clicking for the next mission on the war table and it’s telling me that this is the final mission. The final mission is a good mission, no doubt, it took me around an hour to complete it.

The next thing that I want to talk about is how the game looks and plays and this is a very good-looking game, I’ve played through it both on Xbox One S and PC. PC was the better of the 2 because I could set the graphics up high, but even then, on Xbox One this still looked phenomenal. The detail in the environments are brilliant, especially on the PC version, the depth of the shadows and lighting is impressive. The options available to customise the experience as well and tweak the graphics to your own needs is seriously impressive as well.

One thing that disappointed me with the worlds was that each mission you choose to undertake is played within the same worlds, so you’re going to see the same places over and over again, which as I talk about the missions later on, gets fairly repetitive as well, I hope in future updates more areas and even more worlds are added. It would be awesome to have a multiverse with different earths to select from and each area is completely different depending on which earth it is you’re on. They could introduce Titan, Asgard, Jotunhiem the home of the frost giants, The Chituari Homeworld, Knowhere – The options are endless of what could be added and I thoroughly hope more places are added.

Now, what can I say in regards to the characters, the first thing that I will say is Bravo to Crystal Dynamics for picking Kamala Khan (Ms Marvel) as the main protagonist for the campaign, seeing her grow from nerding out at the A Day Celebrations to being a kick ass character is brilliant, and on my first play through on Xbox, I used her for most of the missions as I loved her powers. The only problem I found with that was that when it came to the end of the campaign, a lot of my characters were still had a low power rating, however, a benefit was that when Kamala was a companion on missions, she would be quite strong which helped out a lot.

The combat I thought was quite smooth and when you’re getting a combo together it looks pretty awesome, especially as each character brings their own style to the game and again, I think this is an area that Crystal Dynamics have done brilliantly to bring the characters from the Marvel world to life. The good thing with the combat

The one part that I felt the game fell down in was the post campaign content. I didn’t feel like there was much there to keep me going, yes, there are missions from vendors which increases your rank and refreshed daily, there’s vaults as well as warzones and more, but this can get very repetitive, there is definitely more room here for extras to be added in.

Another section of the Avengers game which I’m not sure was needed within the game was the gear option. It just seems to me to be extra bloat on the systems that you already have in front of you. Personally, I think it would have been easier to just rank up characters through the XP done in combat, completing missions etc. I understand that with the game going for a Destiny 2 style live event style they would have needed a gear type system, but I don’t think personally that it was needed, especially when I rank a piece of gear up and after the next mission it’s already outdated by something new, it just feels a waste of resources. Maybe this can be changed in the future as the game grows.

Personally, I am having a blast playing Marvel’s Avengers, I love the Marvel World and I will no doubt continue to play and support this game and hope it becomes the game I know it can be. If you’re a Marvel fan I have no doubt that you will love this game. The combat and the worlds you visit are brilliant.