Marvel's Avengers

Marvel's Avengers

Even Thanos himself would snap this game out of existence.

Genre:	Action Adventure
Platforms:	Microsoft Windows PlayStation 4 PlayStation 5 Xbox One Xbox Series X/S Google Stadia
Release Date:	Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Google Stadia September 4, 2020 PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S 2021
Game Engine:	Foundation
Developer:	Crystal Dynamics
Publisher:	Square Enix Europe
Franchise:	Marvel

"Marvel's Avengers is the true triple-a game experience. If you want an idea of how shameless, how exploitative, how just downright despicable the video game industry has become in the past 10 years, well this game will give you a nice vertical slice. It takes some doing to turn Marvel's most iconic set of heroes into examples of lifeless drudgery, but Marvel's Avengers has done it."
— Jim Sterling

Marvel's Avengers is an action-adventure game developed by Crystal Dynamics^[1] and published by Square Enix Europe in 2020.

Plot

Marvel's Avengers takes place five years after a day dedicated to the Avengers called "A-Day", which went disastrously after mass destruction happened, and the Avengers were forced into hiding after being framed. Since then, superheroes have been made illegal, with an organization known as A.I.M. taking their place. After discovering that A.I.M. seeks to kill every superhero, the Avengers reassembles to stop them from carrying out their plans and prove they're not the bad guys everyone now views them as.

Bad Qualities

The game is riddled with microtransactions in the form of poor looking cosmetics, cards, and moves.
- Some of the cosmetics cost up to thousands of in-game credits, which can be up to $14 just for one outfit.
- Some of the cosmetics are also blatant product placement, such as the costumes designed after Verizon.
Many of the missions are similar to each other, with the players having to from point A to point B and defeat the same set of enemies. This, combined with the combat being as generic as they come, will quickly make the game repetitive.
- The lack of enemy variety won't help matters.
- Like most other generic looter-shooters, most enemies are bullet sponges, making combat longer than it needs to be.
- The same bosses will also be fought over and over again.
The game offers daily challenges, but this gets boring fast due to the lack of content and repetitiveness.
Loot in this game is downright pathetic as most of them are either going to be obsolete or weak to the point Anthem and Destiny's RNG look generous.
The cutscenes drag on for too long, not helping is that they're also uneventful for the most part.
Although interesting, the story feels cliched, where the antagonistic faction is seen as the good guys and the heroes are seen as the bad guys. There's also conflict between the heroes throughout the story, but a bunch of it feels forced.
Collecting challenge cards for the heroes takes a long time, and the rewards the players get for collecting them are mostly disappointing.
With the exception of Kamala Khan, most of the characters are lacking in personality, especially when compared to their comics and MCU counterparts.
- Their designs are also rather cheap looking, resembling someone in poor cosplay than actual superheroes.
  - Abomination, for instance, rather looks like a cheap version of Killer Croc.
The game suffers from poor optimization with the addition of many bugs as glitches are common, such as the models of the heroes glitching out when customizing them in the menu.
- When hitting an enemy, there's a chance they'll go flying in the wrong direction.
- Enemies will sometimes not make any sounds when in combat.
- The frame rate is abysmal as it can drop way below 30fps. It's so bad that it almost makes the game unplayable; in fact, there's even frame rate dips in the credits!
- Long loading screens, even for very short missions.
Clunky UI that places the icons and objectives all over the screen.
There is a ton of shaky-cam and incredibly thick motion blur during combat segments, which will not do players who suffer from motion sickness any favors; worst part is that neither of them can be turned off. At least games like Uncharted 4: A Thief's End allowed you to adjust the amount of motion blur used.
The graphics are rather outdated looking, comparable to a late gen 7 or an early gen 8 game.
- Texture pop-in is common.
Unoriginal environments that are seen in tons of other games, with many of those games executing them better.
- There's also a lot of out-of-place feeling platforms and other structures that can be found throughout the game.
Slow camera that trails behind a lot during combat, especially when the combat gets pretty chaotic.
The heroes' AI when they're NPCs is terrible, with them often doing nothing to help out the player.
Awkward walking and running animations for the heroes.
Monotonous voice acting, with some voices not matching their characters at all such as Captain America's voice.
- All of the NPCs, companions and enemies alike, never shut up during gameplay, which can also get distracting.
There's a surprising lack of villains for an Avengers game with only 4 villains in the entire game, 3 of those villains being boss fights. At least with Marvel's Spider-Man, there's 12 villains to fight against (excluding henchmen).
Because of the playerbase declining shortly after release, matchmaking and finding other players is difficult.
Unless you play the game on PlayStation, you will not be able to play as Spider-Man as he is a PlayStation exclusive character.
The promised DLC content didn't release on time and they keep delaying the DLC more and more, most likely because of the game's buggy state. Because of this, people began to point out that something similar happened with EA's Anthem where they made a roadmap for DLC, but because of the game's issues the roadmap was derailed.

Good Qualities

The more creative missions that don't involve simply going somewhere and defeating enemies can be enjoyable.
A lot of graphical settings to choose from, with the game giving you previews to help in seeing the difference.
Although the combat is mostly poor, the heroes' attacks are well animated and can be fun to use.
While it isn't particularly special, the soundtrack is good and has a cinematic feeling to it.
Each hero has a different fighting style during combat, which can help reduce repetitiveness.
- They also have some interesting skills that can be enjoyable to use and experiment with.
Despite the problems with the story, it is pretty decent, and has some memorable moments.
More heroes will be added through free DLC.

Reception

Marvel's Avengers was met with mixed reception from critics, and mostly negative reception from gamers. On Metacritic, the game has a Metascore of 70/100 for the PC and PS4 versions, and a 63/100 for the Xbox One version ("mixed or average reviews" for all three versions). The user scores were a 3.8/10 for the PC, a 5.6/10 for the PS4, and a 4.0/10 for the Xbox One.^[2]^[3]^[4]

Angry Joe initially gave it a 5/10 but dropped it down to a 4/10, criticizing the gameplay calling it boring, how buggy it is, and how it reeks of corporate saying that it "feels like a corporate satire of superheroes like Amazon's The Boys". The game was ranked #2 on Top 10 MOST DISAPPOINTING Games of 2020! and #3 on Top 10 WORST Games of 2020! videos.

Marvel's Avengers has performed disastrously commercial-wise, resulting in Square Enix losing about $63 million because of the game's poor sales (something of which Square Enix chose not to reveal).^[5]