Plenty of games have followed in the action-looter footsteps of Destiny, but few have done so with a universe as exciting as Marvel’s Avengers. It’s a loot-based brawler full of superhero flavor, but the joy of smashing villains in the face with Captain America’s shield can unfortunately only carry it so far. While its single-player campaign is good on its own merits, that’s only a small portion of the whole package – and the endgame loot grind that’s meant to be the meat of the meal is an overly repetitive (and surprisingly buggy) mess that gave me very little reason to stick around.
The main menu of Avengers actually has one button that launches its very strong “Reassemble” campaign, and another for its painfully repetitive and unrewarding “Avengers Initiative” multiplayer. Right off the bat, it warns you that the latter option is full of campaign spoilers, and you’ll still need to get almost to the end of the former to unlock all six heroes currently available. In this way, you could decide to just treat Avengers as a single-player game by playing its roughly 10-hour campaign and ignoring its multiplayer altogether if a game-as-a-service treadmill style of play wasn’t what you were looking for.
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But the sins of the latter undoubtedly affect the former, and you can feel it within a few hours of launching into the campaign. There’s certainly a lot to have fun with here, as every hero brings a distinct style to their combat while still being similar enough to make swapping between them from mission to mission relatively seamless. The appeal of controlling that team of recognizable heroes – Captain America, Thor, Black Widow, Iron Man, Ms. Marvel, and The Incredible Hulk – is fundamental to Avengers, and it was at least sturdy enough to get me interested in the post-launch plans Crystal Dynamics has already laid out. As you might expect, however, what’s here at launch holds very little appeal (and certainly not much of my attention) once the campaign credits have rolled.
The Marvelous Ms. Khan – Campaign
Played on its own, the Reassemble campaign is a fun superhero beat-em up that tells a great story, even if the closely tied co-op multiplayer that follows causes its progression to be unsatisfying and a chunk of its missions to feel like filler instead of superheroics. Jumping between different Avengers to strike back at the classic evil Marvel organization A.I.M. (Advanced Idea Mechanics, basically bad guys who use science and robots) is nearly always enjoyable, but it also isn’t afraid to pause cinematic spectacle for more intimate and often funny character moments too. In those quiet scenes, Avengers feels far more like Crystal Dynamics’ recent Tomb Raider games than the stereotypical action-looter systems lead me to expect.
That enjoyment largely comes down to the excellent writing and character interactions, which quickly drew me into this brand-new Avengers story. I loved watching a young Kamala Khan, AKA Ms. Marvel, find her footing as a new hero as much as I loved watching the rest of the Avengers pick up the pieces of their past failings. Each hero is well acted and well used (except for Thor, who is charming and entertaining but just sort of… there, story-wise). And while the overall plot is ultimately a fairly simple one, this campaign is still a highly entertaining comic book action movie in playable form.
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Sandra Saad’s Kamala is delightful and funny, standing out as an endearing and fresh-faced protagonist while still acting as an ideal vehicle for us to enter the world of the Avengers. Troy Baker’s Bruce Banner is also exceptional, riding the line between a lovably awkward nerd and the rage-filled monster lurking just below the surface perfectly. The dynamic between the two is at the heart of this story, and thinking back now I remember Bruce adorably fumbling his way through trying to comfort an upset Kamala more fondly than any of the times I used his alter ego to blow up giant robots. Mid-mission dialogue lines are generally less memorable, but the conversations during its more cinematic cutscenes can really be special.
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And that’s the rub: there’s a nugget of a linear, single-player Avengers game visible here that I really wanted to see more of. The majority of campaign missions are specially tailored around whatever hero they give you control of at the time – avoiding any big spoilers, scenes like running through a building under siege as Tony Stark while piecing together a makeshift Iron Man suit or exploring an old SHIELD facility full of reclics as Kamala appealed to me on the same level as games like Tomb Raider or Uncharted. These missions were almost always a thrill, supported by oodles of fun Marvel references for fans to pick up on.
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Unfortunately, the spackle between those unique moments is less enticing. Instead of exploring hand-crafted areas, the story will occasionally ask you to run through its own versions of the generic open worlds and A.I.M. facilities that are later recycled to death in most of the multiplayer missions, completing dull objectives that aren’t designed with your specific hero in mind like standing on aggravating control points or punching specific baddies. While not frequent enough to ruin the story’s momentum entirely, these missions are undoubtedly its weakest moments, and it’s a real drag that this padding slows down an otherwise top-notch single-player campaign.
To a similar end, character progression during the campaign also suffers due to Avengers’ overall focus on multiplayer. Gear is a mostly irrelevant part of the single-player experience, only popping in to occasionally annoy me with a message that my inventory space has reached capacity again, requiring me to stop and clear it out one by one. And while a hero’s many skill trees offer some more interesting choices later on, you’ll barely scratch the surface before the credits roll. That means that while you can ignore the multiplayer if you just want to play through the campaign, you’ll still feel the negative effects of it at times.
Hulk Mash! – Combat
Thankfully, the superhero power fantasy and combat fundamentals of Avengers’ beat-em-up brawling really work. Each character has their own unique attacks, special abilities, and signature style, but they are all so entertaining that I was genuinely happy to switch between any of them. It’s a hoot to smash enemies as the Hulk, shoot them with Iron Man’s repulsors, and throw Thor’s hammer at them alike, especially in the sometimes smaller-scale encounters found during the single-player’s more unique levels.
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Avengers makes it fairly intuitive when you first step into the shoes of a new one, too, but the way it manages that is a bit of a double-edged sword. Despite being wildly different, each character is functionally similar when it comes to controls. They have a light attack on Square, a heavy on Triangle, a dodge on Circle, a defensive move on R2, and some very similar basic button combos. The good news is that means it takes essentially no time to pick up a new hero and start effectively cracking skulls with them. The bad news is that, despite their impressive diversity, the cast can feel a little homogenized in terms of how you’re practically using them when compared to other hero-based games.
It can definitely be fun, it’s just all a bit one-note. Most fights devolve into mashing the light and heavy attack buttons, though you do have to be smart about dodging, breaking enemy guards, and using defensive abilities. And while enemies are not too visually diverse – you’ll be punching a lot of robots – there are plenty of different types, and the stronger among them can benefit from a beatdown that exploits their shortcomings. For example, heavy hitting enemies pushed me to dodge big swings before unloading on them, while ones with shields needed powerful hits to break down their defenses.
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Apart from obvious things like attack types and Iron Man being able to fly while Captain America is forced to run laboriously slow behind him, the main aspect that differentiates how each hero plays are their three unique Heroic abilities. These are epic, cooldown-based moves like Hulk creating a shockwave clap, Kamala becoming giant, or Iron Man calling down the massive Hulkbuster suit. Heroics help characters feel more mechanically diverse from one another because they have abilities that require more thought to use effectively than basic attacks, and they can often be tweaked in interesting ways in each hero’s skill tree.