I played the beta exclusively on PlayStation 4 over the past weekend (Aug. 14-16), so I can't comment on regard how the game performs on PC nor Xbox One. I spent the most time in matchmaking/War Table missions with Hulk and Ironman the most out of the four available heroes - Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan), Black Widow, Ironman, and The Incredible Hulk. Thor and Captain America were briefly playable during the introduction/tutorial sequence that kicked off the beta.
There will be a final open beta session from August 21-23rd for those who wish to try the game out for themselves in this last go-round before the game drops next month on September 4th.
The beta allows players to play the A-Day event that kicks off the events of the main narrative in the campaign. This level serves as a tutorial and formal introduction to how each of the heroes play and their distinct powers and playstyles. This mission is capped off with that boss fight with players in control of Black Widow in pursuit of Taskmaster.
Ironman can hover above battlefields and rain fire down from a distance with his unique combination of repulsors, lasers, and rockets. If that's not enough, he can summon the Hulkbuster armor to deal even more damage. Thor can deal massive damage with each swing of Mjolnir and summon it back and forth as if you're controlling Kratos from the God of War (PS4) game. Captain America excels at hand-to-hand combat, which was highly reminiscent of his gameplay in the Captain America: First Avenger movie tie-in game, Captain America: Super Soldier. Black Widow and Ms. Marvel have their own unique takes on close-range combat as well. Widow utilizes her speed for devastating hit and run attacks with her grapples and melee attacks when situations get too close for comfort. According to some players, she's being regarded as the most broken character in the game currently. Ms. Marvel on the other hand is a combo powerhouse with her "embiggened" limbs dealing massive damage. She can also grow in stature as well. Last but not least, the Hulk is slow, but can easily demolish everything in his way with his raw destructive power. He can grab enemies and use them as weapons against their allies, along with picking up pieces of rubble and hurling them like projectiles.
After the events of A-Day play out, the beta fast forwards a bit into the game's narrative where Kamala Khan joins Dr. Bruce Banner in investigating one of Tony Stark's safe houses in hopes of finding the means of locating him. Kamala's powers were awakened by the Terrigen Mists that she was exposed to during A-Day, so players are able to take her out for a ride throughout the course of this story mission. Kamala acts as the eyes of the audience, much like Jubilee did in X-Men: The Animated Series.
Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel is voiced by Sandra Saad, even though I thought most of her lines sounded like she was doing an impression of Ashley Johnson - at least that's how it comes off with her material in this beta. I'm more surprised that they didn't go with Kathreen Khavari, who voiced the character in just about every Marvel medium to date, especially when she's no stranger to working with some of the voice acting talents of the few cast members reprising their roles from Avengers Assemble - Laura Bailey (Black Widow) and Travis Willingham (Thor).
Newcomers include but not limited to Jeff Schine (replacing Roger Craig Smith's Captain America from Avengers Assemble), Nolan North (replacing Adrian Pasdar's Ironman from Avengers Assemble), Troy Baker (replacing Kevin Shinick & Jesse Burch's Bruce Banner from Avengers Assemble), Darin De Paul (replacing Fred Tatasciore's Hulk from Avengers Assemble), and Edmund Kingsley (replacing David Kaye's J.A.R.V.I.S from Avengers Assemble). I thought I heard Jennifer Hale as SHIELD Director Maria Hill too, but I could be mistaken.
The mission to find and search for J.A.R.V.I.S. in Stark's safe house turns into a battle against A.I.M. (Advanced Idea Mechanics, who have been pegged as the primary antagonists for this game by the developers) who have overrun the area, looking for any clues to find Tony Stark/Ironman as well. From here, you play the first part of the mission as Hulk as you destroy everything in your way to get inside first before A.I.M. After things turn for the worse, you find yourself in control of Kamala as she's pulling switches to find her way into the inner confines of the safe house until she is able to find J.A.R.V.I.S.' original hard drive among Stark's archived Avengers memorabilia.
After this, Kamala is confronted by the Abomination, where control switches back to the Hulk for a boss battle. This wasn't hard by any means as the six generators in the room deal massive damage to him and stun him long enough for Hulk to get a few attacks in. Hulk repeats this several times in succession before defeating him. Once Abomination is defeated, Kamala accesses some footage from A.I.M scientists who have somehow uncovered the means to reverse the widespread mutations that were caused by the events of A-Day.
It's obvious that the Inhumans are going to have a heavy emphasis in this narrative given the fact that a Terrigen Mist bomb was the "cataclysmic" event tied to the A-Day tragedy. With that being the focal point or rather subject manner for this game, I can easily see why they went with Ms. Marvel/Kamala Khan as the "main character" in a sense, instead of the "political statement" that people were quick to jump to conclusions about. Whether people realize it or not, but Ms. Marvel has been a VERY popular character since her introduction into the comics continuity in 2013. Same goes for Miles Morales/Spider-Man back in 2011. Kamala and Miles tend to get shoehorned into the "forced" diversity that Marvel Comics was criticized for during their All-New, All-Different Marvel Comics reboot/rebranding from 2015-2019, but those characters were proven to be successes without being tied to that rebranding. I'm actually glad to see these newer heroes getting the spotlight for once.
Before he is fully operational, J.A.R.V.I.S wants Hulk and Kamala to investigate one of the SHIELD installations to get some more components for he can properly access the global network and possibly locate Tony Stark. At this point, you can roam around the Avengers' make-shift base of operations out of the safehouse. Each of the Avengers have their own quarters, with players only being able to access Hulk/Dr. Banner's room and the make-shift room that Kamala claims as her own. When you're ready to undertake missions, you can go to the War Table and access the panel where you find a wealth of missions and tasks to undertake.
It was at the point of the beta where it feels a little daunting at everything that's going on. It's a little much to take in at once as the beta gives you little to no explanation of what all of this means once you gain access to the War Table.
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| Don't be fooled but all of those pretty gadgets don't change a darn thing about your hero's individual appearance. |
Some missions reward your heroes with better gear. Others reward you with collectible comic while some reward you with a rare artifact that boosts your heroes' skills and abilities. But there's one thing consistent about these War Table missions across the board. They are ALL bland and boring. Nothing but slogging through uninteresting environments, beating up a few bad guys, combing over even more boring environments in hope of finding chests to get new gear from, otherwise you're not getting much in terms of drops from enemies. I couldn't see myself holding any interest in this game long enough to grind for "legendary" gear, even though I was rewarded with "epic" gear from one of the Hulk-themed character missions.
Character management is done through menus in and out of missions where you customize stat-increasing gear and cycle through the available options on your designated hero's skill tree. Since this is beta access, you are unable to access the full scope of your hero's skill tree, but invest in one portion of the tree at a time. I'm guessing that this will change with the full retail release for next month as a lot of these skill trees reminded me much like those found in Borderlands or Marvel Ultimate Alliance. Speaking of Marvel Ultimate Alliance, that's exactly what the gear system reminds me of. The only difference seems to be that gear can be "boosted" depending on how much resources you have available from accumulation from completing missions, opening hidden chests, and smashing stuff in the environment across the various locales. The biggest disappointment about this gear/loot system is that the gear doesn't change how your heroes look visually. It's nothing like Injustice 2's gear system where you wanted to complete your next match in hopes of seeing what new gear you could unlock to customize your heroes and villains to your liking. In this game, the gear is merely there for boosting your stats. Nothing more. That's pretty underwhelming if it wasn't boring enough that very few of the available missions provided any gear to unlock.
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| Upon loading up the beta for the first time, all players have about 3450 points to spend on in-game cosmetics to change your nameplates, hero outfits, or your emotes to use in matchmaking during co-op missions. |
If what was locked in the menus are any signs of what will be available in the retail release, I can't say that I'm overly enthusiastic about the hero skins that can be earned throughout various means. For those who don't know, every playable hero has multiple alternate costumes/skins that change their appearance of how they look when you are using them in combat. Everything that I have seen in the beta for the four main heroes that were playable (Hulk, Ironman, Black Widow, and Ms. Marvel) doesn't look good at all. It's not that the costume choices are bad. It's that the in-game character models still don't look good to me. I didn't like the character designs for this game back when it was announced at E3 last year and I STILL don't like the designs now. To be fair, there's moments in the cinematic cutscenes and story missions where I don't have a problem with how these characters look, especially on current-gen hardware's visuals, but holy fuck does this game look like something on the tail end of something on PS2/vanilla Xbox or last-generation consoles when things really get chaotic onscreen.
After you complete one more go-fer mission for J.A.R.V.I.S. for his systems to be fully operational, that's when he introduces Kamala to the H.A.R.M. challenge rooms. In these missions, Kamala can step into the shoes of any Avenger and battle against waves of enemies as the player familiarizes themselves with each hero's skills and unique abilities. Completing all of these challenges unlocks a bonus item for use in Fortnite for your participation in this beta.
There's character banners/titles to unlock from character usage/progression as well, but out of the weekend that I played the game, I only managed to level Hulk to level 13 (out of a maximum of 15, but gear can be leveled up to a max of 45 power in this beta) while only leveling Ironman to level 7. These rooms are a blast with a full group of human players controlling the available heroes, but much like a lot of things in this game, it gets pretty old quick. I'm not faulting that aspect on the developers but just in general that games like this tend to get very redundant, especially these looter-shooters or gear-grind games like this, where it's stomp the floor with a group/room of enemies then rinse and repeat. It was redundant in Borderlands and other shooters like that and it was VERY redundant in the Marvel Ultimate Alliance/X-Men Legends series too.
I have seen a lot of people describe the combat as "button-masher friendly" but I want to clarify something. I don't know what drugs those folks were smoking but you will get stomped royally if you're merely mashing buttons, especially during the prologue/A-Day section. There's a method to the madness so to speak in the combat. Some enemies have shields that must be either maneuvered around or broken through with the sheer force of special skills/abilities or by charging up heavy attacks by holding the corresponding button. Other enemies have an indicator to allow you to know that you can either parry or dodge their attacks with a precise input of that corresponding button. This is where the problem lies in my honest opinion.
Some characters are designed very well to take on these particular opponents while others will face some sort of shortcoming of doing this consistently. The vault-over mechanic is extremely flawed when your lock-on targeting indicator barely even registers long enough to even execute this maneuver. There would be times that you would trigger your characters' abilities and they wouldn't connect at all or would play out on invisible enemies while your allies are pummeling the actual enemy. Dodging (excellent with some characters but completely nonexistent with others) and parrying attacks was a complete mess when playing with other human players as the timing would get muddled up with inconsistent frame rate during the more hectic battles with everything going onscreen. When combat actually worked well, it was a thing of beauty. It wasn't on par with some of the over-the-top craziness found in the Devil May Cry games or anything from Platinum Games' vein of action games, but there's a lot of potential for combos to really get ridiculous, especially with human-controlled heroes working together. That was something I loved about Marvel Ultimate Alliance/X-Men Legends games when each of the human-controlled heroes would bring their unique powers and abilities together for devastating effects. At times it was truly chaotic because my teammates and I would be more caught up in creating the most insane combination of attacks rather than worrying about anything else. Acquiring gear and/or alternate costumes/skins came secondary to the fun that aspect of gameplay provided.
(Laughs) I have friends who complain about the grind for weapons and armor in Monster Hunter World being a slog, but you haven't seen shit until you've grinded for gear in this game. At least Monster Hunter World's battles are downright fun and interesting with different ways to approach them. This is just the same shit over and over again with lackluster objectives.
The last thing I'm going to touch on are the visuals for this game. There's moments where this game looks absolutely amazing in cutscenes during the story missions as you are watching conversations and action sequences/set pieces play out, but there's others where this game looks like something from two or even sometimes, THREE console generations ago during gameplay. I have a love-hate relationship with a lot of the character designs in this game too. I get that they wanted to distance themselves from the traditional Marvel Cinematic Universe looks of these iconic characters, but at the same time, I know that they have DECADES of material to pull from in the source medium to be inspired by instead of creating some very cheap-looking costumes and character models that come across more as actors COSPLAYING as the Avengers rather than the actual Avengers.
I'm sure that's going to be the excuse the developers will go with, but you can't look at models like Hulk/Bruce Banner and Black Widow and not tell me that they look spot on to their Marvel Cinematic Universe counterparts if someone was doing a poorly made cosplay of those characters. I can't give the visuals a pass in terms of environments either. So many stale, lifeless corridors and cramped up rooms to do battle in. You have to be kidding me that they couldn't come up with some better locales, especially given the subject manner of this game.
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| You're going to see this loading screen a LOT during gameplay. |
Closing Thoughts
After spending the weekend playing this, I was more interested and optimistic about the actual narrative than anything to do with the multiplayer mission format. If Crystal Dynamics thinks that they can keep players engaged for several years with that type of content in the current form that it stands then they must be delusional at this stage. With the actual retail release date right around the corner, I doubt much is going to change despite the complaints and player feedback. Playing this beta pretty much confirmed my thoughts and predictions from my first reactions to the trailers for this game, the story will be worth a look, but everything else leaves much to be desired. It's a darn shame too as there's some good ideas in terms of aspects of the combat gameplay, but everything else about this game outside of the narrative feels like a complete afterthought with the idea that this game will be sold solely off the Avengers marketing label.
(Laughs) Just ask some of the Marvel Netflix TV shows (namely Iron Fist Season 1 and The Defenders) and The Inhumans TV mini-series, you can have the Marvel label attached to your property and people call it out for its bullshit. This is no different.
I will say this much though. Playing this beta made me really happy to know that I don't have to put a dime down onto this game anytime soon. With the way that it's looking right now, this could easily be the 2020 version of Anthem's release all over again.
