It’s been a rough few months for Marvel’s Avengers — the lack of a road map, slow bug fixes, and the poor marketplace that only seems to offer variations on the same Joe Fixit, Kamala and Natasha skins every week, shook the confidence of even the most optimistic players, with some already writing it off as Square Enix’s Anthem. Well, after weeks of delays, the first new playable character and storyline, Operation: Kate Bishop — Taking AIM, is finally here, so let’s dive in. Spoilers after the jump.
1. Endgame in Sight
Taking AIM already follows on the threads established in both of the Reassemble campaign’s post-credits scenes, with the real Monica Rappaccini having ascended to the position of AIM’s Scientist Supreme, while the ancient Kree Sentry MODOK revived sent a drone to alert the Empire that Earth’s Inhumans had been activated. Kate Bishop (Ashly Burch)’s search for her missing mentor, Clint Barton (Giacomo Gianniotti), leads the Avengers to discover he and Nick Fury had been working with Rappaccini to prevent a Kree invasion, which she learned about from her older self via time travel.
When Clint’s retrieved from the future, we see a world ravaged by more Kree Sentries, one of which nearly pushes its fist through the time portal. It clearly sets up the next DLCs after Operation: Hawkeye — Future Imperfect, as the Avengers will need to recruit as many heroes as they can to stop the apocalypse. Suffice to say, it’s surprising how pivotal a piece of the puzzle Kate’s introduction is, given how down-to-earth her comics are: it’d be like if Daredevil had a DLC that didn’t revolve around Hell’s Kitchen and the Kingpin.
2. Hey Ash, Who Ya Playin’?
I’m a big fan of Ashly Burch — the YouTube channel she starred in with her family, Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’?, has provided endless hours of amusement — but I didn’t know what to make of her as Kate: I’ve always read her as having a more deadpan tone of voice, whereas Burch typically gives enthusiastic, high-pitched performances (Horizon Zero Dawn being an exception that proves the rule). After playing the DLC though, I’m struggling to remember what I ever imagined Kate sounding like, because Burch nails it: she’s so much fun to listen to, that you don’t mind thinking, “Hey Ash, you’re an Avenger now?”
3. Kate the Teleporter
To justify Kate’s presence on the roster, she’s been given a jury-rigged teleportation device taken from AIM that allows her to warp across the battlefield (which also acts an energy barrier), and a katana blade (possibly a reference to Ronin, and Clint’s mentor Swordsmaster). She’s a lot of fun to play, nimble and deadly, and it is pretty wild how, unlike Iron Man and Thor, she has unlimited ammo. She’s addictive to play as, although I have some qualms about what impact depicting Kate as a glowing ninja will have outside the game, since comics have always folded in what’s introduced in other media, and because Clint’s gameplay in the next DLC could be rendered boring by comparison.
4. Temporary Teammate?
Kate’s fairly well integrated into the game, though she sadly doesn’t have anything to say about the Avengers’ rooms on the Helicarrier, and tellingly, she disappears from the ship if you select another character. There also seems to be a bug affecting the progress of the ambient conversations with her teammates, except Thor, who her rapport with is delightful (we learn he bought her earplugs to better ignore his snoring, for instance). I take this to mean Kate won’t be present in dialogue scenes from future storylines, even if we can continue to play as her.
5. No Wonder It Took So Long
If you were hoping Kate’s missions would be as cinematic and tailored around her character the way the campaign missions were, bad news: it’s all the same old War Zone missions, just bookended by cutscenes that are nowhere as long or thoughtful as the ones from Reassemble. Maybe Kate’s powers make her well-suited to the sprawling fights, and there are some tweaks to the puzzles and new enemy archetypes, but each mission is still a progression from a big, AIM-infested wilderness to the objective in one of their underground labs — you even have to play as one of the starter characters during her introduction. The only fresh gameplay here, other than Kate’s combat, is the introduction of the Super-Adaptoid, who should’ve showed up immediately after the first gameplay loop of the climax, instead of after the mandatory tedium of the second and third.
Continued belowAs it is, the DLC feels overly long, stuffed with the usual mooks with large health bars to pad it out, as if it were compensating for the delay. If Crystal Dynamics wanted to ensure these additional characters and their storylines were coming out monthly or bimonthly, then they should’ve aimed for quality over quantity, and axed some of these missions: I am absolutely in favor of shorter story DLC if it meant the addition of the new characters and overarching narrative progressed more rapidly. Since Clint is an AI companion during the final mission (and therefore has some abilities in-game), why not combine some of the DLCs? (Also, if the DLC was shorter, perhaps it would allow Square Enix to cut cosmetic prices permanently, since there wouldn’t be such a need to rely on the marketplace to cover the cost of these free expansions.)
Bonus:
– This is Kate’s first major appearance outside the comics (she only had a silent cameo on one of the Disney XD cartoons), and it’s pretty interesting how, between Burch and Hailee Steinfeld’s casting on Disney+’s Hawkeye, the lily white character has now been played by two actresses of Asian descent.
– There’s a couple of moments of ludonarrative dissonance: the cutscene where Kate discovers Clint is working with AIM implies she infiltrated the base on her own, when getting there was a regular co-op mission; and during the climax, she actually runs out of arrows.
– One of Kate’s emotes is a reference to Lucky the Pizza Dog: his absence makes you wonder how Falcon’s Redwing will be handled though.
– I was not expecting the Super-Adaptoid to be voiced by a woman.
– Really? No new achievements/trophies?
That’s all for now — hopefully Clint will wake up from his coma soon, and we’ll be able to play Operation: Hawkeye within the next couple of months: perhaps the dystopian future will offer some truly new gameplay loops.
