This review is based on impressions during 72-hour early access, and beta gameplay, while using the PlayStation 4.
There’s a lot of pressure on Square Enix, Crystal Dynamics and Eidos-Montréal’s Avengers video game to succeed: it’s not just following in the footsteps of the enormously successful movies, and Insomniac’s brilliant 2018 Spider-Man game, it’s also a sprawling online loot “shooter” that’s set to run and run for years, with regular free updates adding new characters and storylines. This isn’t a flash-in-the-pan movie tie-in: it wants to be your new favorite video game.
Before we delve into whether it succeeds, a brief plot synopsis: it’s A-Day, and the Avengers and SHIELD are unveiling the Chimera, a helicarrier powered by the newly discovered clean energy source Terrigen. However, an attack led by Taskmaster accidentally unleashes the Terrigen Mists, devastating the city of San Francisco, and creating the Inhumans. Five years later, the Avengers have disbanded, and AIM has taken over from SHIELD, fortifying themselves across the globe as they round up Inhumans for a supposed cure. One young Inhuman, Kamala Khan, discovers the truth about AIM, and must reunite the Avengers before they’re too late to stop the rise of their leader: MODOK.
1. The Story is Excellent
Avengers’ single-player campaign, dubbed Reassemble, is easily the strongest part of the game, filled with beautiful, poignant writing and voice acting. Forget all the jokes online about how the Avengers look like Disneyland actors: in fact, the game turns this on its head when you begin as little Kamala Khan on A-Day, and genuinely feel the joy and wonder she experiences on meeting her heroes.
Kamala is truly the game’s protagonist: you’ll play the most often as her, and it often feels like we’re watching her own movie. Sandra Saad is wonderful in the role, and so is her rapport with Troy Baker as Bruce Banner, which the writers have wisely made the game’s central relationship: she’s the kid who thinks she’s a freak because of anti-Inhuman sentiment, while Banner is the Avenger whom the public believed was a monster.
The game is always conscious of Kamala being a Muslim girl, and it seems its intensely topical story was inspired by that: the tragedy of A-Day has been exploited by AIM, who have flooded the streets with propaganda and robotic patrols, stoking fear as they round up Inhumans for processing. Kamala is part of an online resistance, and the game feels like it’s tapping into the fantasy of being able to go beyond activism to actually fight back against the rise of fascism — it’s probably the closest an Avengers story has ever felt to being an X-Men one.
Speaking of fascists, Usman Ally is absolutely superb as big bad George Tarleton, aka MODOK, who is at once incredibly sinister and pitiful. Thanks to his giant head, MODOK’s become something of a joke at Marvel over the decades, but this version is no laughing matter: seeing his transformation over the course of the story, you realize for the first time how much pain and agony he must be in — and nothing quite prepares you for just how freaky his final form is, especially when juxtaposed against a normally proportioned human.
Travis Willingham and Laura Bailey are excellent as Thor and Black Widow, as always: they’ve been voicing the characters in cartoons and games for years now, with good reason. Nolan North is the bigger question mark as Tony Stark: he’s fine, but his voice is so distinctive, and he seems a little young, although that does make him unique (the cool sibling Kamala never had to Bruce’s foster dad, per se). In contrast, Jeff Schine does a really good job of reminding you Captain America is from the ’40s, recalling Brian Bloom’s pre-Chris Evans portrayal in Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Ultimately, everyone gets to shine during the often poignant cutscenes, which are surprisingly deliberately paced.
2. But This isn’t the Avengers Game We Deserve
Like the Hulk, Avengers is basically two games on one file: one is a compelling, suspenseful and cinematic platformer clearly made by the creators of the Tomb Raider reboot, the other is a sprawling, addictive, but tedious co-op game. What’s frustrating is, to progress through the story, you will have to do some co-op missions, and they are co-op missions, regardless of when you play them, or if you use AI companions. They always take place across sprawling forests, deserts, ghost towns, or identikit AIM corridors, with the camera always at a distance, and the dialogue is always over radio (and sadly, said dialogue doesn’t change depending on who’s present — it becomes pretty obvious Nolan North was busy).
Continued belowNone of these levels reflect a specific character’s design, which can result in immersion breaking moments, like you being expected to slowly run across a whole map as Captain America (his bike was presumably destroyed on A-Day), or certain characters having to take the elevator/APM. The fights, where a bajillion AIM robots and goons show up to stagger and confuse you with a million different colored lights, often descend into disorientating and frustrating lagfests, with vague objectives, and unfortunately that does seep into the story mode.
Another issue is that each character plays similarly in combat: they’re all interchangeable, with certain pros and cons, so no one feels they’ve drawn the short straw when playing together, and that’s disappointing when it comes to powerhouses like Hulk and Thor. It makes sense that Cap and Black Widow would have to repeatedly punch and kick enemies, not so much them — at some point, I realized I preferred the combat in the Lego Marvel Super Heroes game: Hulk didn’t need to smash his foes repeatedly to get them to stay down, and Iron Man didn’t need to recharge his repulsors. Of the six at launch, Ms. Marvel is probably the most fun, as her long reach allows her to exercise some crowd control.
The traversal could also do with some work: the running can be janky since you need to press on the joystick, and Hulk and Ms. Marvel’s jumping has a surprisingly limited range, so landing where you want is always uncertain. Thankfully, Kamala soon realizes she can grab ledges while falling, but the difficult learning curve returns when Cap becomes playable again: no matter how many games it appears in, wall running will always be difficult to maintain a flow with. The game also can’t seem to make its mind up whether characters can just teleport their way back up, or fall to their deaths and cue a loading screen: it seems Crystal Dynamics just couldn’t let go of creating Lara Croft’s gruesome game over deaths.
3. It’ll Look Better on Next Gen
The graphics are noticeably weak during scenes with strong, cloudless sunlight, which lends certain moments and environments an oddly faded look: a prime example would be the view outside the airborne helicarrier (your main base of operations), which looks strangely low-res. Otherwise, the game is rather atmospheric, and fairly pretty — its main issue here is that cloth textures are sometimes slow to render, and in a few cases, fail to appear entirely.
This is a game with little to no pre-rendered cutscenes, so it’ll often put a lot of pressure on current gen consoles (my PS4’s fan is particularly noisy in this case), and it didn’t surprise me that, as I approached the end of my 12-hour playthrough, my AI companions started to bug out completely. In more than one way, Avengers resembles Mass Effect 3, another incredibly ambitious game released towards the end of its console generation’s lifespan, that was prone to crashing after being played for too long, due to the sheer amount of scenes rendered in real time.
4. Gear is Just Extra Work
Thankfully, Avengers’ crafting is not as daunting as it seems, thanks to a helpful option to automatically equip the best items you’ve gained, allowing you to dismantle everything else, and use those spare parts to further improve your stuff. (Some weaker gear possesses some fun side effects, eg. Pym particles that give a random chance of shrinking foes, but at least the option is there.) However, this book keeping is just a distraction from the fact that the game wants you to keep playing it: to level up characters for harder side missions, you’ll need to replay the easier ones to unlock more loot — that’s right, they don’t level up together.
There’s something very strange about an Avengers game where JARVIS is constantly reminding you there’s a loot box near by, or forces you to mop up resources dropped around the battlefield like a desperate scavenger. Point is, the only real character this system makes sense for is Iron Man (and maybe Cap and Widow): no one is making minor surgical improvements to the Hulk’s spine, or changing Mjolnir’s handle — it’s all quite dishonest. It’s also strange how your gear’s power levels have no bearing on which skills you can unlock.
Continued below5. Monetizing Customization Was Admirable But Mistaken
When Kamala finds the Hulk, he’s sickly and pale, with long, shaggy hair and a beard. That appearance continued throughout my playthrough, even after Banner shaves off his beard (and yes, I know the Red Hulk happens to have a disappearing moustache). That ridiculousness is a result of Square Enix opting to justify the cost of free story DLC by putting most of the character skins behind a paywall: to unlock Hulk’s “iconic” appearance from the start of the game, you’ll need to finish his own subplot, the completion of which requires (surprise) gaining enough experience by playing easier missions, and doing some combat challenges.
Truly, it’s like being goaded to pay more money for a classic looking Hulk skin, with saturated flesh and purple pants. You can also unlock skins by completing daily and weekly challenges, which again, turns side missions into a chore, and has no correlation with the skills and power levels you’re already working to gain. I don’t know what the solution to ensure everyone gets to enjoy the ongoing storyline is, but the prices being offered for in-game currency are far too steep ie. the credits required to unlock all of Kamala’s outfits cost roughly $50 — it’s outrageous.
When I think about Marvel’s Avengers, I think about how an important moment between Kamala and the veteran members of the team at the end was spoiled by the presence of a visible gameplay icon in the background. That icon was for the War Table, the device which lets you decide your next mission, whether it’s the next compelling chapter of the story, or another frenetic, and tedious raid on AIM. The game is the very definition of a hot mess, and for better or worse, it’s here to stay — hopefully, as the years progress, the gameplay will become as good as the storyline, but for now, until all those extra hours arrive, it’s only worth a rental.
