Anyone else here really digging Marvel's Avengers?

GB staff is meh-to-negative on the full release of Marvel's Avengers, but I think the single-player campaign makes it an above-average experience. I love the combat - it feels weighty and destructive. Surprised it's been getting so much hate during today's live stream.

The gameplay is too repetitive to support an "endgame service" model, especially with the gross $100 currency packs it offers, and the multiplayer is just... there. But the gameplay and story in the single-player campaign are both solid.

I wish they'd gone the full Spider-man route and made this single-player only, and priced it at $50. That said, anyone else having a blast?

I'm only a 4 or 5 hours into the main campaign but thus far I tend to agree. I'm not as down on the live service model mostly because this one doesn't seem too bad. Yeah the MP is kind of take it or leave it, but if they can continue to deliver story content with the quality of the writing and voice acting that is in the Campaign, then I'm fine. It really can't be undersold how surprisingly strong the Campaign is. I went from off this game entirely in the Beta to quite surprised with it after some of the reviews in progress from major outlets were noting that the SP Campaign was far more fleshed out than the Beta had indicated. We'll see how they handle future character releases, here is hoping it's not just more heroes to do the same activities and that they have some plans to throw some of their writing and cinematic prowess to more of the games endgame plans.

I’m really liking it, not only the campaign but I’m also really excited about a live game with a story I can follow. I’m a regular Destiny player and believe me, I’ve tried to grok the lore but it is such a mess that I just cannot get myself to care. But Marvel shit, feed me that story all day.

From the stream and a few other videos I have seen: it looks fine. Probably somewhere between the good MUAs and something like a Spider-Man or Arkham to make you feel like the superhero as you fight faceless enemies

But, I dunno. It looks like just another loot/grind game? And at this point that sort of puts it into battle royale territory where the people who care already have their games of choice.

Yeah, I'm really enjoying it. I think this game probably represents the biggest disparity between my opinion of a demo/beta and a full release. It's not the live game to end all live games or anything like that but for what it is it's solid. The steady stream of unlockable cosmetics through the character battle passes and vendors is also very satisfying. It's a decent brawler where you get to see the numbers go up, great!

Reddit has been freaking out about 3 things that I totally agree with though: enemies use too many unblockables, you're constantly getting staggered, and there are turrets everywhere. Also the matchmaking has been broken all week which totally sucks.

I was completely ready to skip this game. The beta did it no favors and I didn't enjoy my time with it, compounded by the marketing for it making it seem like a real boring "one of those" loot games.

Then people started getting access to the full game and word of mouth seemed to do a 180. Largely influenced by Patrick Klepek's early impression on twitter, helped by some other people expressing genuine praise for the story stuff, I said hell with it and picked it up, continuing my seemingly vain search for something to fill the Marvel Heroes whole in my gaming heart.

Holy crap am I glad I did. This game is AWESOME, and the marketing/beta for this game was freaking HORRIBLE. The fact they didn't lean more on the story campaign in this game, which is a breath of fresh air for Marvel stories (doing all they can to go no where near story beats from the MCU). Kamala is an amazing character, who I've always loved in Marvel stuff, and seeing her as THE main focus in a game including Iron Man, Captain America and Thor, is actually kind of insane. It's also maybe the smartest damn thing they could have done with a super hero game, putting the general audience in the shoes of someone they might not be very familiar with. Considering everything going on in the real world during this hellscape of a year, playing someone who is upbeat and has genuine enthusiasm fore life, is damn refreshing. The voice acting in this game is also very good for pretty much every character, though sometimes Nolan North's Tony Stark bordered really close to his Deadpool voice from those games. I'll just assume it's canon that Deadpool has infiltrated the Avengers and is trying to run things.

The campaign is good, the combat is pretty fun and the heroes feel quite different from each other, even though there are a few I don't like playing as. The difficulty options give you a good range to find what feels "right" for how you wanna approach it, I played through everything on Hard and it was challenging but not impossible. I'm working through post-game stuff now and that's when you really start to see the "GAAS" angles, and thus far it works. It wears the Destiny influence on it's sleeve so you know what you are getting into after the campaign, should you want to keep playing.

I'm most excited about the potential for expansion over the years. I really, really hope future updates are sizeable and they get really weird with it. The game already gets into some of the really funky aspects of comic book worlds, so here is hoping future content and story let's them go deep.

I should be a huge mark for this game, but it's just not what I'm looking for.

I always planned on getting it for the campaign, with little interest in end game loot stuff. Worked for Destiny 2, and I'm pleased to hear that approach may work here, too.

I've been enjoying it as well. I'm glad to see some other people having a good time with it. I've been slowly putting together a crew of PS4 players to do some group content once people get the single player campaign wrapped up. Looking forward to hooking up with some of the GB PS4 community to punch some robots.

I had been working on some impressions blogging to help demystify some of the game's mechanics but I've got surgery scheduled tomorrow morning and I'm probably gonna be out of commission for a bit so... Nice to see some people are coming to it fresh and enjoying their stay.

So on a scale of 1 to 10, how good of a Marvel: Ultimate Alliance replacement is this game?

@facelessvixen: It depends on what part of the MUA experience you want. If you want to roll through and beat up dudes and get gear, it scratches that itch. If you want a large roster of heroes and tons of boss encounters, give it a year or so to expand out its content. Also, the story is much better here, so if you just want a cool marvel adventure this game delivers.

@facelessvixen: Not sure how helpful this is but my husband was watching me play while he told me about his day and said “you know what this game reminds me of? X-Men Legends.”

Is the gameplay actually that much better compared to the beta? As in: Feels better, flows better... Better rate of gear drops... Etc? Because I hated pretty much everything about the gameplay in the beta.

@undeadkink: The combat is the combat. If you weren't feeling it in the beta, you're probably not going to enjoy it now. That being said, how much did you level up your characters in the beta? I felt like the combat started to flow better once I opened up the characters' skill trees.

The single player game is remarkably better and more interesting than I had any expectations for. It looks great and the VO is really strong. An interesting story keeps me engaged. The thing I'm really impressed with design of combat. The language is all the same between each character but the variation of how each character works is really impressive and how much they feel like the character. I could see this going so wrong but man, Iron Man feels like Iron Man. And that's kind of the point.

The single player game is remarkably better and more interesting than I had any expectations for. It looks great and the VO is really strong. An interesting story keeps me engaged. The thing I'm really impressed with design of combat. The language is all the same between each character but the variation of how each character works is really impressive and how much they feel like the character. I could see this going so wrong but man, Iron Man feels like Iron Man. And that's kind of the point.

As an adult with grandchildren, this game is incredible. We've pretty much exhausted ourselves on MUA3 (I sure have) and this has more engaging combat. Being a person that generally just wants to spend gaming time with friends and loved ones, socializing and sharing an experience, I am pleasantly surprised.

@undeadkink: I didn't play in the beta but I imagine it must. At the beginning of the game obviously your skillset is very limited, and it expands as you level your character. I've also found each character has a pretty different feel overall and I'm not sure how many characters you could play as in the beta.

I will say that it took some getting used to for me as early on I was just mashing buttons and kind of having a miserable time. It seems like the game does encourage you to be a little more deliberate with your combo strings and such otherwise you can take some massive hits to the face while mashing out long light strings and the like. I also had to get pretty good at recognizing when to parry hits, as that turns out to be a pretty important thing as the difficulty ramps up.

The biggest complaint I've seen tossed around is the number of shielded enemies and the difficulty they present. As your develop out the characters everyone gets skills that are dedicated to managing/breaking shielded enemies and some characters seem to specialize in that more than others.

I think it's kind of like any game with character progression like this. At level 1 you're gonna have a punch and a kick. At level 15 you're going to have a kick that stuns, a kick that launches, a punch that breaks shields, a jumping punch that floor bounces, an aoe that marks targets for additional damage, a multitarget lock on ability... etc. Plus when you unlock masteries you get a more World of Warcraft style talent spread that lets you modify abilities to do extra things. I recently unlocked the option to have Black Widow's grenade attack create a poison cloud for damage over time or simply multiply to three grenades for a larger area of effect (and a third thing I can't remember off the top of my head).

@scottg13: Yeah. I went into this game with zero expectations. Having been a Destiny player and being very excited about that, and then having played many of it's paid expansions I expected the campaign to have some cool setpieces but largely be short and disjointed. I expected it to be a voice over saying "this is the thing we're doing now" followed by a repurposed multiplayer mission with the occasional cutscene and it would all be over in less than 2 hours before you were set upon The Loot Grind.

With the exception of half of the gameplay past the Point Of No Return at the end of the campaign I thought it was all surprisingly solid and compelling. Kamala's story kind of takes a backseat in the back third of the plot until the very, very end, and mechanically that portion of the game is a little awkward as plot-wise it unlocks the last few playable characters but as the story is wrapping up you get little no time using them. Also that last "mission" is absurdly long in comparison to the others in the game and could definitely do to be broken in half, particularly because the first half feels incredibly bland and generic for a major climax moment and the events of said moment feel a little bit rushed and without weight. That final boss encounter though. That was a'ight if not a bit janky in some phases.

Hey screw all of you for somehow making me 180 on this game that I originally wasn't going to get at all and now might buy at full price.

@bearhardt: Agreed with you on the final set piece being rad, but kinda clunky. Interestingly enough, people that do a few side missions and really feel out all characters will probably find it totally fine. However, as someone who mained Kamala every chance I could, parts of the end definitely had that "oh no I have no idea what this character does" when you had to play as them. That being said, it was still neat to have the final mission of the main story reflect the start, and bounce between all the heroes as they are trying to end what has been going on.

All in all this game is fantastic and I'm so happy. Ultimate Alliance 3 looked really neat, but when I got my hands on it I played for a few hours and never really felt desire to play again. This game has the right mix of comic book deep dives, interestingly and varied characters to play as (once you level them up a bit), and action. I'm still working on end game story stuff, and I'm happy that all the "post-game" mission chains still have a good amount of story and cutscenes/unique VA. I was afraid that the post-game would just be "Ok we have no real reason for you to mess around more outside....fight AIM I guess?", and thus far it is much deeper than that. Also the constant threads and implications of future story/dlc is fantastic, I hope everyone that I've found gets touched upon.

Really, really happy with this game, which I still find mind boggling as a week ago I thought it would be complete shit. Marketing something with this big of an IP attached to it is hard, I envy no one who has to make those decisions, but they still did such a poor job with it, in terms of marketing and the slices the public saw in the beta.

Really, really hope they have the manpower, ideas and resources to keep pumping content into this world. It's set up to allow for SO much, and could become the ideal Marvel video game playhouse, and it has me so excited. I suppose that also sets me up for major disappointment as well, if it's potential is never fully realized. Time will tell, finger's crossed

@takayamasama: Rad! If by chance you’re playing on PS4 we’ve got a community friends list of Giant Bomb members forming to play together. Search for Squad Fulla Hulks in the PSN community thingy and you’ll find us there!

I've always liked nice simple beat em ups so i'm bound to like it, some of the dialogue is weird, i don't think the mechanics are especially great, i've seen quite a bit of glitchiness in the multiplayer, and as nice as free heroes sounds i'm skeptical about what they'll be offering, platform exclusive spiderman is dumb.
I'm not against the game at all, i'll play it some day at a reduced price.

From the first reveal, the dodgy faces (which have been improved), hearing that the project lead maybe doesn't really care about games or the project, really sucked any potential excitement i would have had for the game, but it's here, seems fine, like i said i like to run around punching lots of dudes.

I'm digging it but the amount of times I'm hit by off-screen projectiles/turrets/snipers is pretty obnoxious. There's nothing fun about going around hunting for turrets up on walls

Also, contender for the classic Giant Bomb Award: Best Use of Licensed Music :) (not the theme, if you are far enough in the story you know what I mean :D)

Being compared to Destiny is such a turn of for me.
Would love a good superhero game to play but I just can't get into this.

After marvel heroes died I've been looking for a replacement. when i was told this would be a live service game with free characters and story arcs i was actually really excited. i always wanted a game to explore every part of the marvel universe. as far as that goes its still too early to tell how the dlc will be but i think they have a good system in place. i loved the story and i enjoy the gameplay its really awesome to knock a guy into the air for thor to throw his hammer pinning the enemy to the ground and from my thor's gear that enemy is now freezing to death while i run over to finish the job. i'm hopeful for this games future once they fix all the bugs and start the dlc train rolling.

This is the game that got me to boot up my very old Gamefly account for the first time since... 2012? Hearing incredible things about the 10-12 hour single player campaign and mixed things about the multiplayer live game stuff makes it seem like the definition of a great rental game. Excited to get my hands on it.

Luv the game it's fucking great. Being a marvel fan makes it even better. I love playing as Iron Man, Cap or Thor. Feels great. The fights are nice and i like how you actually have to think when you fight the bad guys and don't auto aim like you do in the Batman games.

@hobozero: A certain torture device maybe?

Really enjoying the campaign as well. The initial intro with the non-MCU faces/voices was rough, but once you get into it you get a lot more used to the slightly different spin on the characters (especially with Ms. Marvel there to improve everything). You get some cookie-cutter missions, but there's enough targeted missions for each character and fun scenes that it makes it all work.

On the other hand, so far I've liked absolutely nothing about the live service aspects of the game. Loot feels like a chore to upkeep and it feels like there is no satisfying progression there. The menus are all a chore to navigate and missing a ton of basic QoL features. The repeatable / open areas of the game are all incredibly boring, and it often feels like you get close to nothing from a lot of the missions progression-wise. They throw you off the deep end with vendors/resources/missions with very little insight on best practices for using everything. It all generally detracts from the main campaign.

I'm looking forward to playing through the rest of the campaign, but it feels like the odds of me sticking with the game long-term are nil. Hopefully they'll keep dropping little new story bits or mini-character campaigns. Or hopefully they'll fix the live service aspects over time to make them less miserable.

I wasn't really interested when it was announced, and the Beta didn't do it any favours either.

... But.. I've bought it and is currently installing. I'm actually really surprised that people are warming to the actual release, it's reassuring.

I didn't even bother with the beta thinking that this game was gonna be the next Anthem. But so far I am loving the campaign. I also have been enjoying all the little collectible codex style entries. I think they do a lot to bridge the gap between the A day events and present day story.

But like others have stated, the loot grind in this is my least favorite part. It's not as bad as Ben made it seem when his inventory filled up on stream; but it's still pretty bad. I've yet to find a piece of loot that's affected my playstyle (something that I found Destiny doing fairly regularly during the intial levelling). I am just so frequently entering the menu, equipping the number and breaking down everything else. It wouldn't be as bad if the game didn't constantly put up a message telling you that you have other gear to equip, even if it is something worse than what I have. The skill tree is fine though and I think that's where the variety builds will come from.

(I have only played some of the campaign so far... And am level 9 with Kamala. So there is plenty more for me to play. I do not know how much multiplayer I'll do though...)

@noboners: One of the smartest things that Destiny 2 did was just give you an exotic weapon and an exotic class armor piece during the vanilla campaign. Just knowing wild shit like that was waiting at the level cap was pretty cool for me, since I hadn't played the original at that point. Even while leveling, the advantage of a looter shooter over a looter brawler(?) is that guns are the literal tool you use to play the game. Getting a new one, even if it's a green SMG you'll shard in thirty minutes, materially changes the experience of playing the game because shooting now feels different. I don't know from experience if getting a new belt for Cap feels like that, but I would suspect not.

I'm very curious about what "exotic" gear looks like in Avengers, and if it has that visceral, game-changing feel like the best Destiny exotics. I feel like these games really need cool shit at the end of the loot treadmill that instantly changes the play experience, on the level of "yo, this gun shoots black holes or whatever."

@shadypingu:

Yeah exactly. I'm hoping for some sort of "enemies explode on contact when thrown" if I'm playing as hulk/Ms marvel. Or "enemies hit with Cap's shield on a toss then magnetize towards each other." Gimme the wild shit. But I just don't think that's in there? I hope someone can tell me I'm wrong.

Like everyone else, I am really enjoy this so far on the Xbox One X, and for the most part it looks pretty good, but every now and then characters will have this series of black outlines around them if there is anything in their background? Very weird.

Also, one part that was maybe not so cool was having to reload the Abomination fight 4 times because he kept randomly falling through the floor and disappearing.

So, after putting another 3-4 nights into it and reaching the last mission of the relatively short campaign, I'm a lot more lukewarm and feel the need to rant with how much the game has been annoying me. The campaign and gameplay remain pretty strong, and there are still a bunch of great campaign moments and a few great custom missions.

But there is also a ton of the live service stuff on top such that the actual story-based campaign that remains is extremely watered down. I can't help being disappointed that I'm going to end the campaign (and likely my time with the game) when a huge chunk of my character's skills and upgrade options are still locked up. And in general the amount of complaints I have about the service game stuff are legion - it's baffling that a game can still be this badly designed after 10+ years of these games being released and improved, which makes it all the worse that it hurts the campaign so badly:

• Collecting daily quests or checking faction vendors requires you to jump to two different zones and walk the length of those zones to do everything. For what is supposed to be a daily activity, it takes almost 10-15 minutes just to get setup to run quests efficiently. It's nonsense. If I'm playing an hour or two a night, losing a huge chunk of time to "setup" is unacceptable. Especially once you add on the fact that the game doesn't play well with suspending, so I'll usually have to load the game up from scratch each time.
• You have (multiple!) vendors in each social zone that sell things for your entire cast of characters. It's annoying by itself, but made worse by the fact that the "compare loot" feature shows your current character instead of the character that would equip the loot. So you have no way of knowing if loot is an upgrade for the character you aren't playing as.
• You also have no way of easily swapping characters to check gear in social spaces and, even worse, you have no way to use most of your characters in the different social spaces for most of the campaign. Maybe some of that gets fixed post-campaign, but right now it feels broken that basically I can't effectively use vendors for most of my characters.
• You can collectively hold a ton of items in your stash, but individually you can only hold 9 items in an equipment slot. If you run a couple missions as a character, you'll almost certainly fill up at least one of those stashes, requiring you to do some inventory management to avoid things getting dumped into yet another inventory stash.
• There is no way to easily tag/dismantle items, and they instead subscribe to the miserable Assassin's Creed system of target each item and hold a button for several seconds to dismantle. So there's again another few minutes of tedium loot management between every 1-2 missions.
• Loot doesn't appear meaningful, at least for the time I've played so far. Even the couple high-tier items I've found aren't really all that great. Usually it just seems like I should focus on pushing that power number up and maxing out green arrows as much as possible.
• The UI and screen are often filled with blinking warning text telling you to equip something, upgrade something, or retrieve something that are incredibly distracting. Sometimes even telling you to do that when a) you've already checked loot and done what you want to do or b) flashing up text telling you to go to a vendor that you can't even access at that time.
• The cost for both in-game currency cosmetics and pay cosmetics are insane. After nearly finishing the entire campaign, I still don't have enough to unlock even a low-tier outfit, let alone one of the unique outfits. I get that is supposed to be part of the long-tail grind and where they make their money, but after 15-20 hours the idea that I'm not even close to getting any new cosmetics beyond the story-granted ones is crazy.

Overall I can't help just comparing it to something like Spiderman and coming away profoundly disappointed that a potentially awesome campaign and mix of brawler gameplay styles was subsumed by the live service game they had to make. If this game was properly balanced for the campaign in terms of skills, leveling, and gameplay, added in an extra mission or two per character focusing on their unique traits in the back half, and removed all of the loot crap, then they would have made a pretty damn awesome Avengers game.

I'm sure they'll fix most of the badly designed live service features, and maybe they'll add more unique content with the new characters, but for now it just feels like a huge missed opportunity.

Edit: And to complete the rant, I finished the campaign last night (which actually has a really good finale), opened up the post-campaign objectives and decided to try some of the sidequests. Now I'm hitting a consistent crashing bug no matter what mission I pick. No way around it that I can see. At least it happened after I finished the campaign. But the game turning completely unplayable after I move out of the campaign is a perfect metaphor for my overall feeling on the game.

My experience with the game has been wildly uneven so far. I think it looks and plays pretty good on a basic level, and I agree that the story is pretty good for this type of game, though I feel like Bruce Banner's voice actor seems half asleep most of the time, which I get is semi-intentional but makes the character very annoying. Ms. Marvel is a great character and really goes against the grain of grim dark protagonists, and in general the game has a very lighthearted approach despite a story that is, on its face, quite serious.

I enjoy the HARM room challenges and some of the other side stuff, and the live services stuff isn't too bad, especially because the vendors don't really sell anything I'm that interested in so the faction EXP doesn't seem overly important.

On the downside...a lot of the mission design is typical live-service bland garbage. The environments look good but they're all kind of like carved up chunks of open world, by which I mean the maps are all extremely generic and clearly intended to be recyclable rather than designed for a linear experience. There are basically no set pieces, which really sucks for a superhero game, and in this regard the game falls short of even the original Destiny from 6 years ago.

The AIM installations in particular just suck. They're just room after generic room and remind me in the worst way of Agents of Mayhem, which was a very bad game. It all just feels extremely cookie cutter.

Despite those issues the relatively fun combat and the good story mean that I'm enjoying the game overall. The loot is...awful and separating out functional loot from cosmetics is really bad, but if the game actually releases new heroes and story content regularly then I can deal with it.

Overall it feels like a game that could have been great but will have to settle for good, mostly because of compromises to jam in the "live services" aspects. It just ends up watering down the design too much, and given how blah most of the cosmetics are I wonder how many microtransactions they'll actually get out of this thing. I'm definitely not tempted to spend real money for the costumes available now, or for level skipping the challenge cards (which are also kind of sucky.)

I'd be very interested to know the behind-the-scenes story with this one, because it feels almost like two separate games. The first half of the campaign feels like the game the devs wanted to make while the back half of the campaign and the multiplayer feels like the game Marvel told them they had to make. The first part of actually pretty good, the rest of it is garbage.

It's unfortunate. If they had decided/been allowed to stick with Ms. Marvel for the entire game there's a really good 15-20 or so hour single-player game in here. As it is, the live service garbage and shitty performance really drags the whole thing down.

@therealturk: I doubt it was Marvel who told them they had to make the game this way. It was probably Square Enix.

I think that otherwise your read is decently accurate, though I think it's not as clearly delineated as that. But the campaign definitely does tend towards the generic as it advances. There's nothing in the later game like your first encounter with Hulk or when you first take control of Iron Man. In comparison the first appearances of Black Widow and Thor are just so generic. It's possible that this was caused in part by deadlines. They developed a lot of bespoke content for the first part of the campaign but for the later parts they might have just had to slap the heroes into what are essentially multiplayer maps and throw some story bits in between.

I've only done the first two missions and beta stuff. Around what percent of the campaign is Ms.Marvel? The fanboy/girl personality type is already getting old.

It's fun to play but I have never seen a AAA game that is so broken in so many ways. Just constant crashes, bugs, framerate issues (on PC 1080/i5-8700k), bad load times even on an NVME, graphical glitches, sound glitches.

I have spawned a mile in the air. Enemies have fallen through the ground but not hit a death-zone. Sometimes my AI companions are multiplied so I have 3 Hulks, a Thor and 2 Iron Men, which makes pretty much any mission easy as hell. Menus have broken, buttons disappeared. I've seen enemies stop moving and become invincible.

And this is not even getting to the design decisions, where ranged enemies will fuck your life, enemy attack frequency is way too high. You will get swarmed by two high level enemies while a turret shoots at you and a man fires rockets at you. You will dodge a weapon swing, but before you can recover, a rocket has already been fired and is about to hit you, then next thing you're dead. Again.

Despite all this I've put like 65 hours into it and have 2 characters left to get to level 50 (BW, Kamala).