Marvel’s Avengers: Who made you King of Anything
It’s A-DAY! Today is the official release of Square Enix’s Marvel’s Avengers, though if you pre-ordered certain editions maybe you’ve been playing for couple of days already! I am one of those people, and while I certainly have not played enough to give a full review, I did want to talk some early impressions and one aspect of the game in particular.
Overall, my early impressions of Square Enix’s Marvel’s Avengers are extremely positive. There is still the aspect of this is a very loot-driven game with power levels and if you aren’t interested in that kind of thing this game may not be for you honestly, and there’s certainly an annoyance factor when I need one type of resource material to upgrade my really cool gear and can rarely seem to get any so if I want to really do that I have to grind out the same side missions repeatedly. As I said, if that sounds like an absolutely unbearable time, this probably isn’t the game for you.
That being said, you’d be missing out on a story, that while it certainly shares some aspects with the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Avengers: Endgame (i.e. tragic event happens, Avengers split up for several years, etc.) it is very much it’s own incredibly solid experience. A lot of that has to do with the very wise decision to make Kamala Khan aka Ms. Marvel the centerpiece of the story. You certainly get to play as the other Avengers, but the single-player is her experience, and it’s great, especially the opening, which is basically you just going around as Kamala at an Avengers celebration day and fangirling out over everything including meeting several members of the team.
I have not finished the single-player as of yet and for that reason, I don’t want to delve too far into things that might be better served in a more full-on review (with luck I will have a review of at least the single-player aspect on Monday and then maybe in another week or so review the multi-player). But I did want to hit in one thing in particular and that is that as entertaining as the single-player has been thus far (and again, the story is very good), it’s very clear that developer Crystal Dynamics just shoehorned multi-player mechanics into a single-player mode and while that’s fine sometimes there are a couple of particular instances where it absolutely sucks and more forethought should have gone into it.
Firstly is more of a general issue-when you are fighting with A.I. team-mates, whether it’s in main missions or side missions, while they fight on their own pretty well when it comes to resurrecting you when you are downed, they can be iffy at best and certainly don’t make it any kind of priority. Sure Hulk, go beat on that big robot 10 feet away, I’ll just lay here dying for 30 seconds until I have to start the mission over, no problem! That’s better than instantly failing a mission because I was knocked out I guess, BUT STILL…
However, the most egregious example of this I have seen so far is inputting “King of the Hill” mechanics into levels where you are just one hero. In case you aren’t familiar with the term, “King of the Hill” is a long-standing game-type popular in multi-player games where you and theoretically up to several teammates occupy and defend a territory for a set amount of time. The territory can vary in size, in some versions you can leave the territory but that leaves it open to occupation by your opponents, or in others, you have to stay in that territory for the entire time whether it’s ninety seconds or five minutes or whatever. In a multi-player setting, this can be a fun yet tense experience. When you are on your own, it’s an exercise in absolute frustration.
So imagine if you will, being a lone Avenger, having to defend a very tiny circle against hordes of soldiers and robots, AND YOU CAN’T REALLY LEAVE THE CIRCLE until the meter reaches 100% which takes a few minutes. You can but then your meter stops and the other meter, the bad guys’ meter, goes up and it goes up fairly quickly and that’s bad. And this is just sloppy implementation, it would be an easy fix to just not have the meter for the bad guys’ thereby giving you a lot more breathing room to accomplish this task. I was able to beat this but only by dropping the difficulty to Easy (which meant going back to the helicarrier and changing the difficulty and starting the mission over, I’ll have a whole thing about how much the U.I. in this game needs work too when I post a more thorough review) when I had been having a good time on Normal. Just leaves a bad taste in my mouth and I had to vent a little.
Anyways, I’m just past this particular mission, if you’ve played the game you probably know exactly which one I’m talking about. Still overall having a blast with the single-player, hopefully giving full thoughts on at least that aspect after the weekend. See ya real soon!
