Marvel Avengers Beta - For Your Consideration Vol.1 & Vol.2

Marvel Avengers Beta Impressions

A full upload with the previous volume. This is the last dissection of the Avengers game via beta

The beta for Crystal Dynamic's Avenger title is finally here or was since it ended yesterday. After playing it for several hours, the experience was ahh...mixed. Note though, I have a lot to say about this, good and bad, and maybe something inbetween all that besides the fact that they all look like rental versions of their movie counterparts. Bad facsimiles of them of course.

Avengers is a game made from culminations of years of work from both Crystal Dynamics with assistant production from Eidos Montreal starting from 2015. Before all this, Eidos Montreal released Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, a game with a questionable content release map involving the segregation of game's overall story content for, well, financial gain. End result was well, bad. With Square Enix's blessings, instead of working on the next Tomb Raider(Shadow of the Tomb Raider), the studio decided to work on making a live service game based on the titular Marvel team. This won't be the only Marvel game from Square either for future references.

So here we are, almost a month from release. The game is finally cooked in the oven, if said oven say had issues with the heating and didn't get proper maintenance. Marvel's Avenger is quite something, it is an ambitious co-op game that is following several formulas from Anthem, Destiny and Warframe. Except while those games were very flexible in terms of mechanics and game design philosophies, Avengers kind of left me questioning its existence. It is stated though that part of the game is single-player only experience as well and the co-op missions make up the other bulk with the two aspects working in tandem. You can play the entire game alone, then again, that wouldn't exactly be fun would it?

Ok, time for the talking points.

Avengers, Assemble!

Within the first hour, you're introduced to the team and thrust into battle against invasive force on A-day. You play as each of them within small segments of set pieces, playing each of them, I figured it's mostly a hybridization of 3D brawler and some other genres. Like Black Widow can go full Tomb Raider with dual pistols and fire while aiming. Iron Man can hover and fly just like in Anthem, shooting repulsion beams while in flight. Thor takes out multiple enemies like they're ragdolls and do some God of War tricks with his hammer. So yeah, basically the gist being; it's mostly a derivative. Actually no, the proper term would be "inspired". Not that the game is doesn't do much unique in and of itself, it does goes to length convincing of how awesome it is.

Not gonna lie, the insane 30 minutes I played of this game pretty much had me going. Even if they took ideas from the games and most of the Marvel rosters had similar moves and control schemes, it seemed like it was really going somewhere. Not only that, but I kind of dig some of the main heroes here(except Kamala, the fangirling isn't working for me). They got stellar presentation with great voice acting to back up. Honestly if this was the entire demo in and of itself, I would have been convinced this could be GOTY. Here's the footages I've recorded just so you get the idea:

Combat is pretty straight-forward yet tricky to master. Here are the controls from the PS4. You have two special abilities(both R1 and L1), an ultimate ability(R1 and L1 together), you can aim with L2 and shoot/throw with R2. R2 is also used for parrying. Square is for light attacks, triangle is heavy attacks which both can be used in combo, circle for dodging and X is for jumping around. You can run pressing L3. Target lock by pressing R3. The combat is pretty button smashy but there are tactics involved and you need to utilize your abilities for mostly special situations that do need it so its not all about giving what you got.

Now this part of the beta is considered to be the prologue to the main game, what happens later is where 5+ years have passed since the A-day incident and now you're playing as Kamala and Hulk mainly, you scour through what's left of the Avenger's outpost before trying to reunite the rest of their teammates. And this is where the ugly side of the game starts to unravel really fast.

Avengers, Reassemble?

I don't know how the game got lost within itself after this section. From here on out, Kamala and Hulk steps into A.I.M facility in order to retrieve JARVIS back. And so, you play as both characters pummeling the lights out of the bad guys. Sure, but as I was playing, the game's camera was started being a complete jerk. There were times it got frantic in small levels that the camera got instantly close and reverted back. Worse is the shaky cam, that might have worked for the Avengers films, Paul Greengrass and Michael Mann but certainly not this game. The animation is also a bit spotty, controlling the Hulk was irritating sometimes, I get that he's big but that's no design compromise if you can't balance it out properly.

The game is fun though, playing Kamala was alright even if similar to everybody else's. But what I've later realized is that this is their basic kit and that the only to unlock cool new moves and such is the skill tree. You have to play the game, earn experience and leveling up earns you skill points. These new skills unlock new crazy moves but also allows someone like Iron man to use laser beams instead of repulsion beams.

And then there's the technical issues. The framerate drops are almost. Visual downgrades have hampered my experience with the allure of the early presentation itself pretty much gone. Not saying it's bad overall and that the first hour was bait and switch, but it was obvious to tell that this did not get proper optimization and QA testing that it needed.

Shortly right after this section of hers was done, got to playing Hulk to fight up against Abomination. This boss fight even though it was pretty easy pretty much got my adrenaline pumping hard. Like you can play this game at various difficulties but the fights being intense and so engaging was also another convincing aspect of the game. This could seal the deal for me to buy one copy myself. Then again, am dubious about its condition at launch. If not for the fact that this game runs abhorrent and the bevy of bugs surrounding this game, would have been a resounding purchase. But then there are other problems around the surface. Pretty serious problems.

Gameplay Loop

So here's the main philosophy behind this, you do story missions and in-between them you do these mobile game designed specific missions that involve smashing turbines, platforms, destroying X amount of enemies. You know missions like that, which doesn't provide much variety or any sense of meaning into why you do these things. I mean you're the Avengers, it is your job to be badass in the first place. But this is like B squad level chores. That's it. You do get around to the good missions but so much tedium afterwards, the interest is lost.

Every match you play, you unlock rewards like new gears which is kind of like Destiny where you wear parts of equipment for your overall gear power. More gear power means you can participate in more difficult missions. Something that sounds pretty contrived obviously.

Of course, that's not all. You unlock gears per character played in mission. I get that this is going towards the MMO online co-op route but for a brawler like this. The main loop needs to be good. You need to design good modes, great enemies, really fun characters to play, something alluring like the story and visuals and even these feel cookie cutter in a sense. Heck, entire game is to a degree, cookie cutter. I at least found unlocking new skills for each of them fun, but with that all being said, it felt as if this is a game that will take awhile to get to the interesting parts. Not that the story itself would be bad but nothing salivating enough to keep you incentivized. Am completely unclear as to what this games future will be, it's very grey somehow. There's potential but they need a lot to do in order to clean up.

Bugs Galore

Yeah, the bugs are pretty prominent here from character glitches like animation out of sync, no contact with objects, missing debris that was grabbed by Hulk, getting stuck between terrain, enemies teleport and so on.

Performance problems are everywhere, that was mentioned before but it did seem like the game was taxing on the hardware a lot to a point that it was affecting its technical coding. Maybe the CPU couldn't process all those instructions in time well enough that this was the end result somehow.

It's clear this game needs more time to be polished, am probably guessing this is why the beta exists. Because we're the free QA testers for them before release.

Future Content

So Hawkeye will not be in the launch product, rather he is going to be as day-one DLC. Yeah, that's it. Though am not sure how big the roster of Avengers will be in the release date, it seems kind of obvious that they are going to be cutting stuff and putting parts of it on DLC and season pass hooks.

But even more egregious is how Sony is keeping Spiderman as an exclusive so the PS4 port of the game only gets access to him. This is hopefully a time exclusive issue, but if not, that'll be terrible.

There are plans to release DLC content throughout the span of years after release since this game is fully a live service product. To keep development and maintenance team afloat, the game will sell cosmetic DLCs via microtransactions or in-game currency. So I hope the rich people and the fandoms feed enough of its pockets well enough to sustrain and maybe become a far better product.

Am going to be honest though, this whole game seems like a next-gen title released now. Not that it does have something really unique and appealing compared to most games these days but instead got release in-between in such a half-ass state.

Crystal Dynamics did open up a new studio in Washington called Crystal Northwest to oversee future contents for the game, meaning that they're leaving the game once it's out and about. Same with Eidos Montreal opening Eidos Sherbrooke in Quebec close to universities for research purposes.

Post Beta

So the second beta is here for both Xbox One and PC included. The game has seen some improvements here and there mainly on the missions and technical aspect(meaning less bugs).

Yeah, but the bad impression still remains. It just doesn't feel as good to play within longer hours and for the long term, it's not much convincing either.

Playing the game on PS4, there are obvious visual sacrificies with some dynamic resolution and visual scaler at play. Meaning at hectic fight sequences, the game will and play a bit asinine.

Verdict

Play the beta if you're really curious about a Marvel game. It's really a mixed bag at the moment.

I feel like they've scraped an earlier version and decided to go full live service with whatever content they could throw. It is really disappointing to see that two great developers of single-player games have been forced to churn out a soulless product such as this and it won't stop from there with Square Enix's contract for future games.

I just hope this helps enough financially to alleviate all of Square's mishaps with titles like Deus Ex, of which am still expecting a game to come out for.

Honestly, am not looking forward to reviewing this in next month, it's a tragic reminder, constantly of terrible business decisions spanning from the purchase of a good company from 10 years ago.