Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsDisappointment, Thy Name is Avengers on PS4
Reviewed in the United States on September 13, 2020
I have gotten to points in this game where I thought I was hitting the groove and starting to enjoy myself and this game found a way to destroy that every single time. It’s just incomplete in almost every way. Except the voice acting. They are universally great. I love the story and really dig that part of it. Everything else needs LOTS of work.
The biggest positive is Ms. Marvel. Not only is her story great and well acted, she’s easily the most well-balanced character in combat. I’ve leveled her up twice that if anyone else because it’s just so much more fun to play as her than anyone else. She was the perfect choice of a main character.
Onto the negatives. The most important part of a game like this is the combat and that is wildly uneven. Just starting from a logical standpoint, it takes Widow and Hulk the same number of hits to take out an average bad guy? And said average bad guy, if he’s mid-punch, will overrule THE HULK who is mid-punch? They just did not make the characters (aside from Kamala) unique enough. Shields should he useless against the Hulk. Having to dodge a tiny robot as the Hulk feels beyond silly.
Like many games this uses a system where an indicator will flash before an enemy attacks so you can dodge or counter. That is horribly imbalanced too. It seems to sometimes work and sometimes not. It is hard to time. If you press dodge too early, even when the indicator for an attack is there, you move but still get hit.
And the sheer chaos of the combat is not fun. Reign it in. You get absolutely rat eff’d over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over in this game. The number of times I rage quit after bouncing from a bomb to a punch to a bomb and dying without getting to make a single move was almost comical. And I played on easy. Shouldn’t it be, ya know, kinda easy? Some levels are fun and playable. Others will see you die within minutes even though they are the same difficulty. Wildly uneven.
The enemy types are also quite annoying. If you get a flying villain with a shield but you didn’t pick a flyer then you’re eff’d. They’ll just sit up there and snipe you to death. There’s shockingly little you can do about it. One of the people on your team might be a flyer but they won’t fly up there and do anything. And you certainly can’t swap between your team members as you need to. That’d be silly.
Also, do you like load screens and watching video game charters loiter around, maybe do some light calisthenics? Then, golly-bob-howdy, is this gonna be a five star game for you! You’ll be watching gobs and gobs of load screens and they seemingly went out of their way to make them aggressively boring. But at least you get time to stare at the bad character design. Seriously, Cap’s outfit is laughably bad.
There’s also way too much going on. There is so much gear and power ups and nonsense that is such a blatant money grab it’s gross. The main campaign is super short and I’m guessing that’s because they want you to spend time on side quests where you need to buy gear in order to participate. There are daily tasks, for example, but are they matched to your current power level? Nope. The game’s been out a week but I need to be at level 50 in order to even consider doing a daily mission or I’ll die instantly. So you need to buy gear and power-ups galore to keep playing past the main campaign which you’ll knock out in a couple days if you really stretch it out. Cool.
If this had not been an Avengers game but just a Ms. Marvel game then it could have focused more and been better. Trying to jam in so many differently powered characters doesn’t work. It’s almost an impossible task so bless their hearts for trying. If you’re a Marvel fan, wait for this thing’s price to drop and allow your expectations to do the same. As others have mentioned, this is buggy so waiting will also give them time to hammer that out because this thing was in no way, shape or form ready to ship and will need a million patches in the opening months.
