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xb-squaredx · 1 year ago

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The Avengers Game: The Surefire Hit That Misfired

With the stronghold that the Marvel Cinematic Universe had on pop culture for the past decade, it was all the more puzzling that they didn’t capitalize on that in the realm of video games. Superhero video games have been a thing since the medium began, but for the longest time Marvel’s gaming efforts were few and far between, outside of the rare Spider-Man title. But in 2017 a collaboration between Square Enix and Marvel was announced, with a variety of game products teased, among them being a project centered on Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. On paper, this seemed like a complete slam dunk. A prolific AAA game developer, a hot IP that hadn’t had a lot of game action in a while, and it would be landing right when the MCU hype was at its peak with the back-to-back hits of Infinity War and Endgame. But that wasn’t what happened. Something went wrong, and the surefire hit….misfired. Just before the game’s delisting at the end of September 2023, I ended up purchasing the game on a deep discount, curious at what all the fuss was about. So let’s talk about how this game ended up the way it did.

A FALSE START

Marvel’s Avengers launched in September of 2020, and to say the launch was rough would be an understatement. Broken matchmaking, a litany of bugs and performance issues, and a deeply unsatisfied fanbase. While it’s clear the pandemic had played a huge part in the game’s lackluster release state, the fact it was allowed to release like this at all was worrying. Only a month later player numbers on PC had dropped significantly and the game seemingly was in its death throes. In March of 2021 the next-gen console versions of the game released, and with it a multitude of fixes and additional content. It was clear this was an attempted re-launch of the game, but you know what they say about first impressions…

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Now, to give the developers some credit, there were legitimate attempts to improve the game and add more worthwhile content. They didn’t just cut and run and leave players holding the bag. Effort was put in to making the game better and trying to right the ship, though the damage had already been done with the game’s reputation. Even as someone who got the game far after every patch and fix went out, I still encountered a ton of issues and on my last-gen PS4 console the overall experience was still rough. It feels like a game that really should have been next-gen only, but was pushed out to the last-gen systems to get as much profit as possible, in a manner similar to the ill-fated launch of Cyberpunk 2077. The sad truth here is that regardless of patches and additions to the game, no matter how many bugs they fixed and feedback they implemented, there were problems with the very core of the game, and in order to properly address these issues…they would have been better off making a new game from scratch.

THE GEAR SCORE MAKES THE HERO

One of the most hotly debated aspects of Marvel’s Avengers was its status as a live-service game. At a time when the “games as a service” bubble was about to burst, fans had largely grown intolerant of more games coming out competing for their time and money, and if you are going to market yourself as a “forever game” with tons of ways to spend money and get players to log in every day, you have to make it worth it for them and…well, I think the game’s overall reception and failure speaks for itself.

So much of Marvel’s Avengers is grinding for grinding’s sake. Everything takes longer to unlock and build up than it should, clearly designed in such a way to squeeze money out of the playerbase. After a certain point, the goal is no longer to make a satisfying game for players and instead to make it into an infinite revenue machine. At the game’s launch you had TONS of cosmetics that could only be gotten through a tedious grind of in-game currency….or you just pay up with real money. At one point the developers even tried to market an experience boosting item for players, before it was removed due to protest. Keep in mind this was a full-price game. Just a few years prior we had Marvel’s Spider-Man as a solid single-player game that had NO microtransactions at all, and a TON of costumes you could unlock by…playing the game. How novel! Speaking of Spider-Man, let’s not forget that one of the most popular superheroes of all time was made into a PlayStation exclusive for no other reason than greed. Now, I’ve played the game long after the final update just unlocked all cosmetics for players to enjoy for free, and what few things I have to unlock from in-game vendors shows me that this grind must have been awful to live through, and it must be even worse if you HAD paid for stuff without knowing that one day it would be made free with the flip of a switch.

On top of all of this, there was also artificial bloat inserted into the game’s progression systems with the focus on loot and raising your player’s Power Level. Over the last few years I’ve seen a lot of games worship at the altar of “gear score” and I hate it every time. They completely miss the forest for the trees regarding what makes loot and loadouts work in other games. Often times your own abilities as a player are downplayed in favor of forcing you to micromanage your gear, and it unfortunately infects the Avengers experience. Despite the fact that you’re playing as Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, you don’t feel all that powerful unless you have the right arbitrary number attached to the endless loot you sift through during missions. Hulk Smash….but only if you put on the wrist guards that give him plus 5% damage when it’s raining outside. Remember how in Spiderman: Homecoming Peter has to grapple with being a hero despite Tony taking away his fancy suit with all those gadgets? Or how this game’s own campaign is constantly touting the platitude that “Good isn’t a thing you are, it’s a thing you do?” Yeah well actually the gear makes the hero, so get to grinding if you want to actually embody these characters!

You constantly have to deal with gear you get from enemy drops, finding them in strong boxes, or completing missions. While you do on occasion find some gear with some tangible effects that you can tuck away for a specific mission, the bulk of gear is garbage and exists almost purely just to sell off to get a pittance of currency in exchange, or later on to feed existing gear and make it stronger. But with each mission you’ll get better and better gear, constantly having to replace what you already had, so don’t get attached. So many of the modifiers and stat bonuses to gear are so minor they don’t even feel noticeable, and what’s more, it’s all there to keep up the illusion of progression.

There’s no actual progression from the gear system; the game automatically scales to whatever your Power Level is when selecting most missions. There are SOME missions that have a higher Power Level by default that you can’t take on until you’re at that level, but they didn’t feel noticeably more challenging than other missions. Now, I never hit the Power Level cap with any character, and I’ve seen evidence that some missions are hidden from view unless your Power Level is high enough, so I can’t quite speak for the pure endgame content, but the bulk of the game showcases just how horrible the gear system is as a progression system. It’s worth noting that there’s also individual levels for each character, which actually works FAR better as a real progression system. Each level up gets you a skill point that can be put towards multiple skill tress that further expand each character’s moveset and allows for experimentation to suit different playstyles and strategies. Gear systems CAN be down well, but it doesn’t work in this game, and I can say with confidence the entire experience would have been better without its inclusion. Getting off of my soapbox then, we should probably discuss the actual contents of the game itself, starting with what many touted as the best part of the whole game….the single-player campaign.

AN INHUMAN CAMPAIGN

A fair bit of the pre-release coverage of this game was focused around the story. Well before we saw any gameplay or even know what type of game Marvel’s Avengers was going to be, they were hyping up the voice cast as if it was a movie. Despite all of that focus, the single-player campaign didn’t exactly live up to my expectations for more than a few reasons, despite a decent start.

The premise is an interesting one for starters. The Avengers are blamed for a tragic accident and forcefully disbanded but years later a superhero fangirl, Kamala Khan, sets out on a journey to help clear their names and get the gang back together. Kamala is one of a few newer Marvel characters that has gotten a fair amount of buzz, similar to the likes of Miles Morales, and it’s undoubtedly great to see her take on a major role in a game like this. The early bits of the game put you in her shoes as she struggles to come to grips with her new found super powers, and the dynamic she has with the Avengers is endearing. That said, over time it started to feel like the story was being stretched thinner and thinner, and more problems started to emerge that sadly weren’t solved by the ending.

For starters, Kamala takes up the bulk of screen time. I don’t mind her being the main focus of the narrative, but for a game named after the Avengers…the team itself actually doesn’t do as much as you’d think. While we get to Hulk and Iron Man early enough, and Black Widow has a decent behind-the-scenes impact on the plot, I really feel like the narrative didn’t know what to do for Thor or Captain America. By the time the whole team is back together the game is about over, and any fun banter or moments they could have had together was mostly relegated to how they all feel about Kamala. There are times when the game’s narrative almost feels like it was written like Kamala’s fan fiction, where she is the center of everything and the other Avengers seem far too trusting and supportive of her right away, not to mention she faces little to no consequences for her actions at times. I want to stress I DO like Kamala and I think Sandra Saad does a good job portraying her, but the game gets awfully close to being a game about Ms. Marvel, featuring the Avengers, and that’s not exactly how the game was advertised.

Outside of that, I take issue with the game’s focus on the Inhumans, or rather, the lack of focus. In the comics, Inhumans are descendants of humans experimented on by the alien race known as the Kree. When exposed to “Terrigen Mist” they develop superhuman abilities, and there’s also a lot of political stuff with a royal family of Inhumans that live on the moon. In this game however, the alien aspects of Inhumans are severely downplayed, and the event that ends up releasing the Terrigen Mist and creating Inhumans here is more or less implied to be completely manmade, with no mentions of the royal family either. While it’s possible the game would have delved into the Inhuman’s alien origins later on (as certain missions do tease the Kree quite a bit in the postgame), all we’re left with in the base game is…effectively bootleg X-Men. There’s this guy, Theo, who can teleport people here and there, and he’s also bright blue…and he kind of just comes across as a less-cool Nightcrawler in every way. When you meet the Inhuman resistance later in the game, they end up being led by…Ant-Man? Because I guess they couldn’t think of or use any other prominent Inhuman character aside from Kamala. For the last few years, as Marvel began really pushing the Inhumans in the comics, TV shows and now games, it was largely as a response to not having the X-Men film rights and not wanting to promote them once the MCU took off. Many fans likewise dislike the Inhumans and view them as poor replacements for the X-Men .While I think both could have their place in the Marvel world and the premise does have potential, this particular game doesn’t really do ANYTHING of note with them.

Then there’s the lack of notable villains. While on the one hand I appreciate that the developers weren’t just reusing villains already seen in the MCU like Loki, Ultron or Thanos, their use of A.I.M. and M.O.D.O.K. leaves a lot to be desired. I’m sorry, but M.O.D.O.K. isn’t a strong enough villain to carry the rest of the game, and while there are a FEW other notable Marvel villains in here, I find they’re not used well. Taskmaster is a tutorial boss fight, and Abomination is fought early on…and then that’s about it in the base game. With both of them copy and pasted into post-game missions with a vague “oh, they’re just clones” justification. It wouldn’t be until the other story expansions that we’d get a few more villains like Maestro, an evil version of the Hulk from the future, or Ulysses Klaue, a notable Black Panther villain, but at that point it felt like too little too late. And that’s not to mention that most of the basic enemies in the game are just robots with no real personality or designs that really pop, or else fighting waves and waves of “guy with gun.” What a notable roster we’re working with here.

For all of the potential that the early hours of the campaign showcased, the cracks started to form quickly and my opinion of the story only went down with time. We started with nice cinematics and character banter, some intrigue with how it was all going to come together…but steadily it became apparent that most of the Avengers were being sidelined, the villains were weak, and the emphasis on hand-crafted single-player levels and setpieces would dwindle with time, revealing the game’s true colors.

AVENGERS: AGE OF REPETITON

For as negative as I’ve been so far, I do want to stress that I DID enjoy the moment-to-moment playing of the game and it’s clear a lot of time and effort was put into making a fun action game with Marvel characters. Now, there IS a certain level of balance here to make sure everyone is equally viable, which leads to some characters not quite living up to the power fantasy. Black Widow can take on enemies just as effectively as Hulk can, while Thor and Iron Man’s flight is slow to keep them from leaving everyone in the dust. Despite that, every character has enough tools to make them pop. Hulk can grab minor enemies and use them as weapons. Kamala’s stretchy attacks let her be a menace from any range. Smacking enemies with Thor’s hammer, or flinging Captain America’s shield at multiple opponents never got old. Even the non-powered characters like both of the Hawkeyes or Black Widow were plenty fun to use, armed with a lot of tools to take on enemies and get around the giant levels. From the intricate takedown animations for each character (Thor having a penchant for wrestling, while Kate Bishop uses teleporting to take out enemies in style) to the heavy amount of customization with everyone’s skill trees, there was a lot to like about the combat…but that can’t save a game that is so dull and repetitive elsewhere.

After the first few hours of the campaign I was suddenly forced to start selecting missions on the War Table and saw the game for what it truly was; the same handful of maps, enemies and objectives repeated over and over and over again. Compared to the curated single-player levels, the main missions, designed around multiplayer, are filled with massive maps that honestly felt way too big for their own good. You have to wander about as you look for small enemy outposts dotted here and there, fighting a pretty pathetic roster of enemies along the way. Not only are most enemies rather uninspired robots, but so many of them are just annoying to fight. Snipers that teleport away from you the instant you get close, endless turrets and drones that are always picking at you from far away, and more “elite” enemies that have tons of health to chew through in lieu of being more challenging to fight most of the time. Bosses are especially bad about this; most are huge damage sponges and play similarly to each other, completely shrugging off any attacks you land and taking forever to take out. I understand they’re balanced around four players but even so they would take so long to defeat and required barely any real engagement. Just dodge the big telegraphed attacks, sneak a few hits in and run, then rinse and repeat for several minutes.

Outside of just fighting enemies, your main mission objectives rarely change up in a meaningful way and just a few hours in I had seen most of what the game had to offer with objectives. Save some Inhuman hostages by opening up their cages, or defend some allies from waves of enemies. Maybe you need to use JARVIS to hack into A.I.M.’s database, so defend those computers from enemy hackers! There is on occasion some “puzzles” that would require a BIT of coordination, hitting switches or stepping on pressure plates to open doors for more loot but ultimately that was about as advanced as it got. Most level design would vary from gigantic open environments to linear corridors that are repeated so often I knew them like the back of my hand after just a handful of missions. Now, again, maybe that endgame stuff does change things up, but I’d rather not wade through so much of the same content over and over to see for myself.

And that’s the real shame here…for all the potential I see in this game, it gets exhausting quickly. It takes so long to actually flesh out your character movesets and try everyone out, but by that point you’ll have done the same handful of missions to the point of getting sick of them. Even with the expansions there just isn’t enough meat here to justify the grind. Sad as it is to say, it was painfully clear just why this game failed after just a few hours of playing.

AN UNENVIABLE LEGACY

The domino effect of Marvel’s Avengers’ failure is arguably just as interesting as the game itself. The poor showing for the game cost Square Enix a LOT of money, and was likely a factor in their decision to sell off their Western developers, including the developers of this game, Crystal Dynamics. The year after this game’s launch, Eidos Montreal’s Guardians of the Galaxy game ended up getting the cold shoulder from fans…despite the fact that it was exactly what many fans had wanted; a solid single-player experience with a great story that had a lot of love for the source material. But fans saw a Marvel game with Square Enix publishing it and assumed it would follow in Avengers’ footsteps. Elsewhere, the frosty reception to DC’s live-service superhero efforts with Gotham Knights and the yet-to-be-released Suicide Squad game can be at least partially attributed to this game’s poor performance. While Gotham Knight’s full release was devoid of microtransactions, the grindy nature of player progression and multiple in-game currencies to juggle points to it possibly being removed later in development. Meanwhile, the instant the word “gear score” was uttered at the gameplay reveal for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League the game was attacked by fans and the game has suffered multiple delays and as of now, it’s not clear what state that game will release in. All due to one poorly-received game!

(One screenshot was all it took for people to turn on this game)

It’s clear that the live service bubble has burst; you can only get so many people to sign up for so many “forever games” before something gives. While your mega hits like Fortnite might continue on, it’s clear by now that you can’t quite compete with that and I wouldn’t be shocked if major game releases start to pivot away from this model. It’s also been argued that the superhero bubble might have burst in mainstream pop culture. Several superhero films over the last few years have not done particularly well with fans OR at the box office. From MCU misses like the third Ant-Man movie, or the latest Thor release, to DC’s extremely costly failure with The Flash, it’s possible that superhero games might also be on the way out. That being said, Marvel does still have SEVERAL other games in the pipeline, such as the next game from Insomniac, Spider-Man 2, so it’s possible this game’s failure wasn’t enough to scare them off.

It’s sad to see how poorly this game performed in the end, even if it’s easy to see why things went this way. In another world, this game could have been a smash hit, creating a platform filled with fun things to do and multiple Marvel heroes added over a very long life. I can only imagine how they might have made certain characters work if they had only gotten the chance. Had the game launched in a better state, or hadn’t gone the live-service route, things might have been very different, but regardless the damage has been done. With Square selling off Crystal Dynamics and Eidos to Embracer, and mass layoffs hitting multiple Embracer entities, Crystal Dynamics included, there’s no hope of a second chance with this title. I can only hope the best for the people involved that they can use their talents on a better game down the line

With Marvel’s Avengers officially delisted from all major storefronts and the future of the game’s online services somewhat uncertain, I thought it important to talk about this game before it is lost to the annals of history. For all the problems I had with the game, I was happy to at least play it before it was too late. I can see that this was far from a cheap cash-in title, and a lot of talented people gave their all on a game that just didn’t work out for a multitude of reasons. I can only hope that someday we can get a more successful spin on Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, and game developers can look at this game as a cautionary tale for how to somehow ruin what should have been a guaranteed success.

Excelsior!

-B

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