2.5/5 ★ – fez219's review of Marvel's Avengers.

What could have been a great Marvel game is just about ruined by everything outside of its excellent heroes. CD nails the core premise by making every single character unique and a blast to play as! Too bad mission and map design for most of the game is dreadful, GaaS gear is needlessly forced, and somehow a Marvel game has 3 notable bosses. Yup! You read that right. There are 3 villain bosses in the game that aren’t just reskins of robots, and you fight 2 of the 3 in the first couple hours. It really sucks that such a great core game is stuck in this dreadful shell. A quick aside, I got this game for ~20$ a while after release. At that price, there's a lot of content now since DLCs and it's worth it if you're looking for a decent superhero game! But as a 60$ AAA game I feel bad for anyone who got it on launch. Yikes! First, let's talk about what's good here. The gameplay! The most important thing. Each character feels very different and has an interesting moveset, so it's easy to stay engaged by switching up your heroes. And, critically, everyone plays well and is super fun! (I haven't tried the DLC characters yet, but I'm gonna assume that the additional characters are a good time too). Each Avenger's moveset feels authentic to the character, expansive, and very powerful. When the GaaS BS wasn't getting in the way, I had a great time. Black Widow was my favorite, with a grappling hook to quickly close the distance against powerful enemies and guns to chip away at the weak ones. I feel like the devs took God of War as an example for how combat should feel, which is a good thing. For example, both Cap and Thor have powerful ranged weapons and can hit hard with their fists even after tossing their projectiles, much like Kratos and his axe. Thor, in fact, has a throw and recall that's very similar and feels great. If you're a fan of Marvel and just dying to play a game that lets you blast through enemies as the original Avengers, this game will at least keep you busy doing that. Crystal Dynamics did a great job making each character fun to play as, true to the characters, and unique. Kamala — Ms. Marvel — is also super fun, and a good addition to the game. If you're a fan of any of these characters, you should at least have a good time taking them for a spin. But it feels like almost every single other decision about the game was intended to suck the fun away from this great foundation. Shame on whatever execs forced the GaaS framework because literally NOTHING about these mechanics works, and it undermines everything fun about the game. It's just so obvious that GaaS was a terrible fit for Avengers. The most obvious example of why this doesn't work is its gear grind. The gear just sucks. It's simply not fun like it is in other games, and it's a terrible fit for Avengers. Like it's fun in Destiny because it changes how you look and how you play, especially with all the different guns. But in Avengers, it doesn't do either of those things! It's all invisible, so doesn't make you look any different. That takes away a huge incentive to play for gear. And even worse, it has no effect other than mind-numbingly dull and opaque stats. The gear averages out to give your player a strength number, like Destiny, but I had no idea what any of it meant other than that number and did not care to find out. Luckily, there's at least an "equip best" shortcut, but it's something I didn't want to think about at all. And the gear grind isn't just not fun, it's totally unnecessary! There's a level up mechanic on top of it, which I actually had fun with. Each character has a number of new moves they can learn as they level up, and I had fun expanding everyone's movesets. This is separate from gear, and the game's RPG mechanics should have ended there. Unfortunately, even the level up system becomes convoluted nonsense to fit more into the forced GaaS framework. I didn't get far enough for this to happen, but after you unlock all the basic moves, there's dozens of extremely minute "skills" to unlock that give negligible bonuses to various attacks and stats, such as "add 1% to light attack damage." That's not fun! You can barely tell the difference, and it's only there in service of suckering players into the dull postgame grind. All of this lame, unrewarding grind means the postgame was something I had zero interest in. I'll play the dlcs, but I don't care to play the boring, repetitive missions (more on that later) over and over in order to do get arbitrary number high enough for more of the same missions later just to grind for meaningless gear. I'll play the dlcs eventually, But I don't ever see myself falling into the miserable postgame. While there's stuff for me to do now, I shudder to think of the game at launch, with a postgame that basically came down to fighting endless waves of robots in the same drab AIM facilities without a proper reward or closure. The mission design is possibly the worst casualty of the GaaS framework. Almost all of the maps and objectives, especially after the short main campaign, are extremely dull and repetitive. The same side objectives with the same puzzles reappear over and over. Nearly every map is a boring AIM facility, which is such a shame when Marvel was at Square Enix's disposal. The game is at its best during the few linear missions that feel built from the ground up for the character you're playing as, but that's a fraction of the missions in the game. Most of the time it's a showcase on how not to do level design. There are some compelling missions that feel more like cinematic, focused single player adventures more Uncharted/Tomb Raider than Destiny. These missions, which force you to play as a certain hero and restrict you to a limited area, were easily the highlights, compared with the open but samey cut-and-paste GaaS levels. For example, one had you playing as Iron Man as he grabbed various pieces of his armor to scrape by a dangerous situation. There were also two missions — the first and the last — that jump around from hero to hero as the Avengers fight together, with the heroes you're not playing as doing scripted things as you go on. That kind of focused gameplay was super fun! It really makes you wish that the entire game was like that rather than the awful, boring AIM maps and objectives that end up being the majority of the game. CD should have been allowed to create a focused game like the excellent Tomb Raider reboot games — which the few more focused missions felt like — rather than the dozens of GaaS gear grind missions that most of the game is. Samey side objectives are scattered around repetitive, open areas with even more repetitive main objectives. You eventually go underground to a cut-and-paste AIM facility to do even more of these boring objectives and sidequests. These missions feel like poorly procedurally generated filler, and sadly are much of the game and all of the postgame. The game's UI is also a nightmare. Much of this is due to all the currencies and filler missions forced by the GaaS framework. Each menu is way overcomplicated and unintuitive, and divided up in a weird way. Like start opens up a pause menu, but pressing it again opens options, rather than closing it, which never stopped being a pain. Every time the action stopped and I had to go through any of the menus, it was an awful, frustrating experience. They also run poorly and are unresponsive. One of the worst offenders is the mission select menu, which is unclear to start and only gets more bloated and awful as the game goes on. The gameplay HUD is a wreck too. It tells you way too much, with dozens of icons and bars onscreen at any given time, yet is unclear about what most of it means. There were a few times when I found myself shot from offscreen from multiple directions with no indication to warn me, which took away from the otherwise great combat. A few enemies are able to freeze you from offscreen, which can be an instakill when you're surrounded. Very unfair! The combat is fun because the Avengers play great, but the awful enemy variety holds it back. Almost everything you fight is an AIM robot of some sort, which just sucks. Fighting nothing but the same enemies from one faction for an entire game isn’t enough to carry a live service type game (which this shouldn’t have been in the first place). See destiny, which also has always had varying issues with being repetitive — it still had distinct enemy factions from the get-go that all felt very different. Even reskins of AIM’s human enemies as something as simple as Kingpin’s goons or something could have helped keep things feeling more varied. Bosses aren’t any better; I counted 3 notable villains that I fought in the ENTIRE CAMPAIGN. That's utterly ridiculous. And you fight 2 of them very early on, leaving nothing but samey AIM bots for the rest of the game until the final boss. That sucks! The story is weak with a nonsensical script; the villian's motivations aren't compelling, and I didn't care much about what was going on when it focused on anything but the heroes. Much of the plot points were basic fetch quest nonsense. The voice performances of each hero, at least, were good, and it was fun seeing them interact — even if much of the quips came across as "hello fellow young person." And I enjoyed that the game decided to focus on Kamala as a fangirl joining the Avengers from the outside; this perspective was fun and refreshing. But it's stunted because the focus was on the GaaS grind and postgame, which permeates much of the campaign's mission and makes for an unfocused story that ends too quickly. There were a few specific issues I had with the campaign too that are easily explained as symptoms of crunch. At one point in the game, Cap has his shield when he shouldn't simply because the devs didn't have time or forgot to program it out. And after much buildup, the final boss is incredibly disappointing. It teases something like Ares in the original God of War, where both the player and the final boss become huge — then resolves itself in a boring QTE. That left me with a terrible taste in my mouth a la Halo 4's final boss, and was a huge bummer. Weirdly, performance wasn't great even on PS5, despite being graphically nothing special even if it was on PS4. To be clear, it's graphics aren't bad! But it definitely isn't as smooth as it should be despite being a late PS4-gen game running on PS5. Certain lighting effects, like Iron Man's chest reactor, look very flat and dated. The faces are rough, although I think character design is fine outside of the generic faces and poor lipsynching. One other quick aside: making Spidey console exclusive just sucks. There's no defending it. The blame squarely (ha ha) falls on Sony. Making any part of a game — let alone a playable character — unavailable in most versions of your game is a gross disservice to players, and I think it actually had the net effect of making the game more hated if anything, which is bad for everyone involved. At the end of the day, it's clear what this game should have been: a focused, narrative-driven experience, not a messy GaaS title full of filler. If the devs were able to focus on a relatively linear experience that makes the most out of each hero, with more engaging environments and enemy variety — rather than dozens of convoluted GaaS systems and missions that prioritize quantity over quality to serve the GaaS grind — the game would have been a great superhero game that could have rivalled Arkham. It's clear a lot of love went into making each hero unique and play great, and the game could have been a really special co-op experience. Instead, it's an approach to a property and genre I hope to never see repeated. I hope CD is given another chance with the Avengers to focus on what worked and axe what didn't, with more independence and less corporate meddling, but I'm not too optimistic that will happen.