AT Gamescom, you can hear the trailer for Marvel Rivals blasting out of the speaker with Captain America shouting “Snap out of it, Bucky!” every few minutes.
It is a bewildering layer of white noise, and the repetition of the looping trailer perfectly encapsulates how I feel about Marvel Rivals.
Characters are well thought out but not balanced for the fast pace of the game[/caption]
Marvel Rivals is NetEase’s take on the hero shooter, with 3v3 team-based battles.
The unique selling point is that you can choose to play as one of 25 popular Marvel heroes or villains, each with their own outrageously powerful abilities.
When there are six S-tier characters on the map, all casting spells and shouting catchphrases simultaneously, it is absolute chaos.
There is some story here, but Marvel Rivals focuses on the combat, which both goes at a breakneck pace and includes screen-obscuring special abilities.
You can easily be winding up an attack only to be hit by a burst of red, and die before you even know what hit you.
PvP shooters require a lot of practice to master, and we had such a short time with the game it’s hard to tell if we would understand what is happening better if we had a bit more experience.
In this first taste though, the map feels too small, and the attack animations are too big and powerful.
There are 25 characters with around seven skills each, meaning that’s about 175 moves you have to master.
This is definitely possible, but it will have a longer teething process than games like Valorant or Apex Legends.
Each character has a unique look with distinctive silhouettes and colour schemes, meaning that they are instantly recognisable, and they all feel very different to play.
This is definitely a feat worthy of praise when there are so many characters, and there are some surprising additions that you rarely see outside of the comics.
You rarely see Jeff the Land Shark, Peni Parker or Luna Snow in the mainstream but they all make an appearance here.
It’s clear that the team has put a lot of time into the characters, who to include and how they should control.
However, in keeping abilities realistic to the comics, it means that they are too difficult to comprehend particularly with the fast pace of gameplay.
For example, team-up moves incentivise players to choose characters that are related to each other like Hela, Thor, and Loki but make things more complex when it comes to team composition.
Marvel Rivals is flashy fun, with a vast roster combining familiar and cult characters from the Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, X-Men, and more.
However, it’s let down by its inaccessibility, though it will likely see improvements before it is released in December.
If you want to read more about upcoming games, check out the biggest game releases in September.
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