This past week saw the release of Marvel’s Avengers from Square Enix, Crystal Dynamics and Eidos Montreal. This game was highly anticipated and from early trailers it promised to be something that was a bit different from past Superhero Games and while I do believe that it’s worth every Marvel Fan’s Time to play it…I might wait a bit before purchasing. Now most of what I’m about to say comes from an area of concern for the game. I genuinely enjoyed it and hope that future DLC and Patches will make it the game that it deserves to be. As Such, here are the following things I loved and hated about the game in it’s current state.
*I will be covering some spoilers in this article but honestly, if you’re a fan of Marvel then you’ll be able to call most of the things that happen in this game.*
Love The Voice Actors.
So first and foremost, Bravo to all of the incredible cast and voice actors in this game cause they were just Wonderful. It’s an All-Star Cast led by Nolan North as Iron Man. For those of you unfamiliar, North is one of the more prolific voice actors of the last 20 years, most notably being known for his role as Nathan Drake in the Uncharted series. Travis Willingham and Laura Bailey reprise their roles from the series Avengers Assemble as Thor and Black Widow and both of them are as good as they always are in their roles. Jeff Schine voices Captain America and, following the Resident Evil 3 remake, this is really his first major leading role and I think he does a great job as our favorite Super Soldier. Sandra Saad is really the breakout star as Kamala Khan and trust me, we’ll be talking more about her later cause she’s magnificent in the role.
The Person who really stands out the most to me though is Troy Baker as Bruce Banner. Obviously this isn’t a surprise as Baker is arguably the best Voice Actor out there(I know that’s a big statement, but I’ll stand by it.) He brings everything to this role like he does in every performance and honestly, Ruffalo is the only one who can contend with him for the role.
Hate The Single/Co-Op Issues.
So the main Campaign is a single player story that occasionally supports Co-Op aspects. Once you finish the campaign is when you unlock “The Avengers Initiative” and you can join up with 3 other players for Co-Op missions. Most of these types of Missions are called “War Zones” where you go throughout a limited free roam area and fight AIM Minions and then search for Loot Chests to upgrade your hero.
Throughout most of the game you have Single Player Levels that were specifically designed for the story and inbetween those is where you had a few missions that are closer to the War Zone levels. This wasn’t an issue for most of the game and I wouldn’t even say that I “Hated” it until one moment in the game : So I loved Playing as Black Widow cause she’s the fastest and is just so much fun to play cause her style is so different from the rest of the team but I realized that there was an issue with choosing Black Widow once I got to a side quest where you have to destroy a door with your charged heavy attack. If I was Hulk or Thor, this would be no issue cause they break basically any door. Meanwhile Black Widow can’t cause her charged heavy attack is a stun grenade. Now, this shouldn’t be an issue cause I have Thor and Hulk and Iron Man all standing next to me as my A.I. companions and if I could issue a command for one of them to break the door then that’d be fine but instead, all three of them just stand there while I try everything in Black Widow’s kit to try and break the door down. (This will most likely be fixed in a patch but currently it’s pretty annoying to deal with.)
Now, I would actually say that the Single Player Moments of the game were standouts. The Flight Sim moments as Iron Man and the final mission where you switch between each different member of the team are the best moments of the game and if they focused more on that throughout the campaign and then saved the War Zone levels for the Avengers Initiative part of the game then I think the story itself would’ve been stronger as a whole.
Love The Original Story
Speaking of the story, I actually really enjoyed the story overall. I said earlier that it was a bit predictable but that’s not really an issue as long as the story is told well. I enjoyed the fact that they were willing to separate from the MCU versions of the characters and decided to stick with their own versions of the characters. Between the fact that M.O.D.O.K. has never been this interesting before and I really liked that the first half of the game is getting the Avengers back together before the big final missions where they’re all together.
The strongest part of the story does come from the characters themselves and their dialogue between each other. Bruce and Tony are standouts in this aspect particularly because Nolan and Baker absolutely nail their relationship with each other from the constant bickering and fighting to becoming close friends again.
Using AIM as the primary villain worked really well for the story they wanted to tell and I’m really excited to see what they have in store for future storylines.
Hate The Lack of Villians/Boss Fights
This is something that will most likely change as we get more DLC but it was annoying that 2 of the 4 Villains in the game were Revealed to us in the Beta. The 4 villains that we see in the Campaign are M.O.D.O.K., Abomination, Taskmaster and Monica Rappaccini. Also, there’s a Loki Cameo at one point but he’s not part of the main Campaign.
Obviously they could release a new Villain to fight with each DLC/Character that comes out such as Killmonger with Black Panther, Swordsman with Hawkeye or any number of Spider-Man Villains when he gets released. I personally hope they do this cause I really enjoyed their designs for the different villians and would love to see what they can with others.
Love The Combat Mechanics
So the game is incredibly fun to play. It really is and even though there were a few repetitive moments, it never really stopped being interesting to see the different abilities that each member of the team could perform. This is especially evident in the Co-Op levels cause you can strategize on who’s going to do what in each mission.
Each character has their own distinct feel and I found that once I really started exploring the various upgrades and stat boosts that you can do that the game really opened up for me. You can really customize each one to your unique playstyle especially once you start getting the mastery abilities after you reach a certain level for each character. This is where the gameplay is strongest and it’s why I’m looking forward to seeing more content being dropped for different story missions featuring our favorite characters.
Hate The Glitches and Bugs
Now, this is clearly the biggest issue and fortunately, the developers have been listening and communicating to the fans as much as they can on their Social Media accounts. That being said, this is still a major issue and I wouldn’t blame anyone who wanted to wait until the fixes and patches go through. There have been reports of people having game crashes, dropped connections on Multiplayer Games, glitches where you can’t progress and the multiple audio/visual issues.
Personally, the only ones I had while playing were the audio/visual ones. The first time it happened was more amusing than anything cause Iron Man kept repeating the same syllable until I finished the mission, this was maybe 20 seconds at most so it was funny. The second time it was happened was right before a cutscene in the story and for some reason it also cut the captions as well which meant that I had no idea what was going on until I shut the game off and restarted.
Once again, I’m not unreasonable. These things happen in games this size and while I appreciate the attempts made by the developers to address the concerns of the fans, I can’t deny the fact that this shouldn’t have happened in the first place. I blame the fact that massive games like Last Of Us Part II and Ghost Of Tsushima didn’t have these types of issues as a factor for why these bugs seem so prevalent to the gaming community.
Once again, these things are apparently being addressed and worked on but I still have to say that Game Breaking Glitches like this shouldn’t have happened after we’ve paid $60 for a game.
Love Everything About Kamala Khan
Kamala is hands down the best Protagonist that they could’ve chosen, especially for the story they wanted to tell. Kamala is a Pakistani Girl who loves the Avengers. She’s got posters, comics and figures everywhere in her room. She writes fan fiction and follows all of their adventures and once she gains her own abilities, she uses her knowledge of the other heroes to improve herself.
Kamala is such a solid choice for a lot of reasons : Not only does she offer more Representation for characters of other races and cultures but she’s also a strong female character who didn’t have to have a shoehorned love interest for her story arc. As a white, heterosexual male I understand that I don’t understand everything about both of these factors but I know that it’s important to focus more on writing like this because everyone needs a hero to look up to and identify with.
Most importantly though, Kamala is just a strong character for all of us to see ourselves in. She’s goofy and cracks jokes, she has her everyday struggles with school and life(moreso in the comics than in this game but we may get more of that later) and she’s a genuinely wonderful person. She just wants to help people because “Good isn’t a thing you are, it’s a thing you do.”
Thank you Kamala, for being our hero.
