Marvel’s Avengers: The not quite Spectactular Spider-Man…

Over a year after he was announced as a PlayStation exclusive, Spider-Man has finally joined Square Enix’s Marvel’s Avengers, along with a pretty massive update that overhauls and streamlines a lot of elements of the game that while they weren’t necessarily a huge issue, could do with an overhaul and simplification.

We’ll talk about the game overhauls before we get to the wall-crawler himself. Firstly, finally after months of barely qualifying as a vendor, Chastity McBryde, is a fully functional cosmetic vendor again. Units don’t come super easy but you do regularly require them playing through missions and suddenly after virtually having no use you have a ton of cosmetic stuff that rotates in and out pretty regularly. There’s also a new loot box system of sorts but you can literally see what you are getting in each box so if you don’t like what is currently being offered you can just wait to refresh. For a game that often charges far too much for pretty bad cosmetics, this is a great difference-maker and might actually make you want to grind units if you see something you like in particular.

Secondly, though I certainly feel it was far less complex than people made it out to be, upgrading gear has been extremely streamlined and definitely for the better. You pretty much just get new gear and don’t upgrade it with materials until you start getting to high end stuff. Even then, it’s much simpler. There used to be like seven different types of resources, now it’s been taken down to three and only two are used for uprgrading gear. I wouldn’t say the system was terrible or even all that confusing before, but this makes it so much easier to grind the resources you want. Overall, just a couple of very big improvements to both the resource, gear and cosmetic systems that will make it more compelling to play the endgame content.

I can’t speak to the game’s first raid, “Discordant Sound” as I haven’t played it, not sure I will for awhile, if ever, cause frankly playing with other people in complex missions is not what I come to Avengers for frankly. I like getting new gear and stats for my heroes offline and just listening to a podcast while mindlessly bashing bad guys with various Marvel heroes.

Now, onto the old webhead himself. It’s really tough to evaluate Spider-Man in a vacuum because frankly we’ve had two really amazing (no pun intended) Spider-Man games very recently by Insomniac that capture the world’s most popular superhero so well.

It should be noted that there is no “campaign” whatsoever for Spider-Man like there was for Kate Bishop, Hawkeye or Black Panther, you just walk to a spot in the helicarrier, there is a very quick cutscene, and Spider-Man is available. I get as he’s a character players on other platforms can’t use why you wouldn’t devote the same amount of attention, but it doesn’t make it less dissapointing and people who do enjoy the story campaigns have little reason to use him at all.

How does Spider-Man play though? I think they did about as good a job of putting a character like Spider-Man in a game like Marvel’s Avengers as you can do. He’s perfectly competent and not a pain to play or anything, and has really good manuverability, but at the end of the day, he just feels like Spider-Man running through molasses. Like the best Spider-Man games give you that sense of of incredibly speed and huge stunts, Marvel’s Avengers just can’t do that the way it is. It’s not s disaster by any means but when you have such recent fantastic efforts to compare it to, it falls short.

But the big question is, where exactly does Marvel’s Avengers go from here? Despite the game continuing to seemingly underwhelm there’s no signs of it being shut down in the near future, personally I’m pretty content to play it for the time being and grind out my champion levels and high end gear. But are we getting more content and major updates or is it going to just silently chug along until Square Enix (or Disney for that matter) decides it’s time to end it?

The fact that nobody has said this last update was the final one makes me think there’s more substantial stuff on the way, and I would certianly love to see more heroes added, but I think to some extent Marvel’s Avengers has made all the swings it’s really going to make and it is what it is. For the record, I think it’s a pretty good game that you can currently play for free on Xbox and is very cheap otherwise though there’s certainly better games, even Marvel games, more worthy of your time. I’ll continue to write about it as long as there’s significant updates, but it definitely seems up in the air as to when or if that kind of thing will happen.

That’s all for today, The Game Awards are happening tomorrow so if there’s a significant amount of Disney gaming-related news I’ll certainly write that up by this weekend but if not I have something else in mind so see ya real soon!