NetEase’s spin on the hero battler is complex and moreish, but rarely much actual fun. Its biggest impact is a renewed appreciation for the rivals that do it better.
Sometimes, you don’t quite know what makes something work until you experience another version of it that doesn’t. This is, unfortunately, my experience of Marvel Rivals, a team battler that is eminently playable and moreish, but also never quite properly good.
In this case, it’s a matter of many, many little things holding Marvel Rivals back, as opposed to one major error, the result being a game that’s much a lesson as anything else: that competitive games, perhaps more than any other, are games that live and die by their attention to detail.
The setup here is brisque and simple enough. Two teams of six heroes slog it out over the usual array of objectives: take and hold a central capture zone until a progress bar hits 100 percent; or escort a payload through three checkpoints to an endzone; best of three rounds wins. Before matches you pick from a surprisingly wide range of Marvel characters, from your classic A-listers like Iron Man and Wolverine all the way to, it says here, Squirrel Girl, Namor, and Jeff the Land Shark. There are some decent tutorial bits, a well kitted-out practice arena and a spot of light PvE in a slightly perfunctory arcade mode, but ultimately this eternal 6v6 competition is the crux of it. It isn’t reductivist to just say this really is Marvel Overwatch.
I should preface all this by saying I really haven’t had a terrible time with Marvel Rivals. It is not a disaster, and despite its very obvious free-to-play trappings it is still somewhat inoffensive there (albeit perhaps only because the sheer, maximalist opacity of its UI is too busy getting in the way for me to ever really engage with its many forms of in-game currency – more on that soon). The problem is it just fails to ever, really, be particularly enjoyable. I’ve experienced something while playing Marvel Rivals. Some frustration, some competitive urge, a few fleeting moments of satisfaction, a few more moments of boredom and disappointment. But none, when I really think about it, that ever really landed on fun.
Let’s get into it then. Marvel Rivals’ single biggest issue from the long list of little ones is probably the hardest to explain, but also the most important. It’s the lack of strategy, which is really a result of something else: Marvel Rivals is overcomplicated, lacking the clear archetypes, obvious complimentary picks, readable environments, and broad character strokes that all combine to give more successful team battlers their special sauce. Which is this: a sense of ongoing, organic, ever-changing tactical narrative.
Rarely in Marvel Rivals will a round, or wider match, have a specific turning point or strategic moment that you remember after it’s over. It’s hard to pin down why that really is, but I figure it’s a bit of a combination, which is normally the case when no single reason stands out. For one, Marvel Rivals’ visual, environmental, and level design has some issues. Maps lack clear shape, structure and flow, with structures often seemingly only existing as deliberate obstacles (an obvious example: all those random chunks of wall that stand between where you respawn and where the battle’s taking place, sitting in some aircraft hanger or cursed arena for no reason other than to make you jump over them or walk around them, breaking up the bland and overlong trudge that’s seemingly only there to make your death cooldown seem artificially shorter). Of Hell’s Heaven for instance, a Hydra Base, the several arenas that make up its multiple rounds are all identical in my mind: grey walls, dark corridors off the side, open air to either the left or right, and a square control zone in the middle with some pillars or walls that sometimes go up and down. A separate point really, but many areas of many maps are also just far, far too dark.
Compounding this is a similar lack of visual clarity and identity to the heroes’ abilities. Take Hulk for example: Hulk has two ranged abilities (which feels inherently wrong – he’s the guy who smashes stuff! With his fists! It’s his catchphrase! – but that’s another separate point I’ll get to). The point here is that these two ranged abilities, amidst the chaos of Marvel Rivals’ frenetic, incredibly fast-paced battles, look and feel almost identical. One is a kind of sonic boom Hulk makes from clapping his hands together, dealing a little chunk of damage to those it hits. Another is a kind of gamma… blast… that stuns an enemy it hits until you punch them again. These are functionally completely different, but the lack of truly emphatic, distinguishing visual, animative, and audio design to them means they can quite literally get lost in the noise.
That might seem minor, but picture the fastest-paced team shooter you’ve played, with all of this going on in the melee of 12 players – some of whom playing characters who can create two or three clones of themselves and blip, dash, transform and teleport – and all with just one or two too many abilities each all piling into one another, and hopefully you can start to see the issue. The nuances of Marvel Rivals’ design – of which there are actually quite a few – are quickly overwhelmed.
One of those nuances, which is a fun and pretty novel idea in itself, is the concept of team-ups. In selecting characters – which you can change whenever you respawn – you’ll see a visual indicator showing which other characters you might form a kind of combo with for a special predetermined bonus. To stick with Hulk, if your team also has an Iron Man and/or a Captain America, their abilities will get a special Gamma buff. Or if you have a Wolverine, Hulk can pick him up and wing him through the air at opponents. Every character has at least one of these, many of them multiple, and at times these can really sing.
The Asgard team-up is a nice example. Hela – the green spikey one played gamely in the MCU by Cate Blanchett – can team up with Loki and Thor for a nicely synergistic buff. Whenever Hela gets a kill, she can revive either of Loki or Thor if they’re currently dead and waiting to respawn. Hela, being a frankly rather overpowered carry right now, tends to get a lot of kills, while Loki is a powerful healer and Thor a frontline tank. When switched on and playing with the team in mind, the combination can be lethal. Likewise Rocket Racoon can lob a special buff at the Punisher and Winter Soldier, two other Dudes With Guns, to give them a burst of rapid fire and infinite ammo – used in the right place and the right time it can be fantastically potent.
The problem again is that there are just too few of these really clear, decisive moments when it might work. The battle is constant, no moments of ebb and flow, no waiting to pounce, no respite. Crucially, I reckon: no chokepoints. Gosh, how I miss a good chokepoint here in Marvel Rivals. My mind keeps darting to that big, horrible wall in the first Overwatch’s Hanamura. For much of a game the attacking team would throw themselves at this chokepoint, crashing against it, testing for weaknesses in the enemy defense, until eventually something broke and they flooded through. Chokepoints, along with being incredibly satisfying to defend, are also a test of your team’s real ability to understand and play the game well: how hard can you concentrate? How well can you coordinate, and stay organised with this group of strangers? How well do you know the map, its flanking routes and intricacies, and the ways they combine with certain characters? How well can you time and aim your ultimate? In what must be 50-plus games of Marvel Rivals, I’ve yet to find a single moment that gets close to this.
The last point on this comes back to the characters, and is that point about the broadness of their design. Remember how Hulk, surely the most pure of all melee tanks in concept (and yes I know he has that sonic clap thing in the comics), has two ranged abilities? This extends to much of Marvel Rivals’ too-many heroes. Take the aforementioned Jeff the Land Shark. Jeff is a support healer, on the surface, categorised as a ‘strategist’ (support) class in-game and absolutely played as one. But in addition to ranged healing and also passive healing from dropping health bubbles for allies, he also has a quite respectable ranged damage attack, and the ability to ‘swim’ on any flat land, becoming near-invulnerable and therefore capable of rapidly escaping any attacks in an instant, on demand. And he also has a hugely powerful ultimate that lets him swim up and gobble down all heroes in a massive area after a brief pause, doing damage to them over time, and also letting him carry them off and spit them out elsewhere.
This is too many things! And aside from just feeling very strong, it blurs the lines unnecessarily between classes, smearing together too many archetypes. It’s also not just Jeff; it’s a clear design philosophy across the roster. Supports can do ‘nuke’ damage with ultimates; carries can become almost invulnerable; tanks can regularly dash and pick people off at range. Coupled with the fact there are just too many heroes at launch – several dozen, some of which are present in every game and some that are almost never, ever seen – each of whom has multiple layers of extraneous abilities, passives, and dedicated resources stacking on top of each other – and that the combat itself, another casualty of strangely lightweight animation and sound, feels weirdly flimsy and rudimental – and the battles themselves just turn to a kind of relentless, swirling, cel-shaded soup.
Unfortunately the little issues don’t end there. Marvel Rivals’ writing, performances and general characterisation are sadly quite poor. Each character has just a couple of lines of dialogue, blurted out in near-unison at the start of each round and almost always bland. There are also pre-set interactions, such as Punisher and Luna Snow: the former asking what she is, the latter responding, flatly, “a famous pop singer”, to which Punisher replies, “I don’t listen to music. I punish criminals”. This would be wonderfully funny if it were in any way intentional, but the absolute deadpan blandness of the delivery strongly suggests otherwise. Another involving Luna Snow has her mentioning Magik’s flaming sword and worrying about it melting her, to which Magik will bluntly reply, “it’s not actual fire it’s soulfire”. Sheesh! Talk about a conversation killer, Magik! For a game based on comics it’s deeply depressing to not find a single good pun or one-liner in sight.
The wider characterisation is related: there are no ‘talk’ prompts, which I personally love in a good hero shooter. And likewise little in the way of emotes (though I have spotted plenty of premium ones on the battle pass). These are the little things – I know, little things again – that make these games what they are. The things that breathe life into a genre that can, if you’re not careful – and especially when free-to-play – feel just a little dead behind the eyes. Speaking of, beyond the battlefield there is an entire world of monetisation and metaprogression going on here, as you’d expect. Too much of this is premium for my taste, with one too many currencies and several too many layers of UI for me to have ever felt tempted to engage with it. This is a blessing in a way – this part of this kind of game is always the most grotesque, much as they need to pay for the servers somehow – but a mild, sensible, smartly interwoven metagame can actually work nicely for a game, encouraging healthier engagement over time, when done clearly and with intent.
Frankly I could go on. The explainer pages for heroes’ abilities are poorly written, often missing key bits of information on how to actually implement an ability in the proper way. Battles themselves are too often painfully one-sided, one team getting absolutely pasted over and over, while there’s no surrender function to let you resign in those cases without punishment for leaving early. The walk back from each death is too long, and too boring, and deaths in this game are plentiful – I’ve had matches with upwards of 40 kills, or where teammates have all had more than 20 deaths. It’s patently derivative in places – far from a crime in itself, this genre in particular is built on borrowed ideas – but all its borrowed ideas here land just slightly less successfully than their originals.
I’ll leave it at that. I should emphasise, one last time, that I don’t really mind Marvel Rivals. I like the invention of special character team-ups, which feels perfectly Marvel in itself. I like the enduring sense of competition it inspires. I just don’t truly like much else. The end result is a game that, above all, makes the success of its own rivals much more clear to me. Suddenly the lectures I sat through at Riot Games’ HQ on sight lines, colour palettes, box heights and map lanes during its preview for Valorant back in the day ring especially true. And Blizzard’s purity of thought, its crystal clear characterisation (Widowmaker and Solder 76, for instance, strangely feel more perfect assassin and guy-with-gun archetypes than Black Widow or Punisher ever could here), its broader brush strokes and smaller roster stand out all the clearer. Making a successful hero-based team battler, as we’ve seen time and time again, is just very difficult work. Making a truly brilliant one is perhaps even harder.
A copy of Marvel Rivals was independently sourced for review by Eurogamer.