Last week I managed to get some time with Marvel Rivals, the next big PvP shooter set to (excuse the pun) rival games such as Overwatch and the like. Marvel is obviously a licence to print money and generally, you can slap Marvel branding on anything these days and you know it will do well to some degree. Of course, there’s an element of burnout as well. People are just a little bit sick of Marvel, because let’s face it, it’s everywhere.
NetEase Games doesn’t care one bit about all that, and has set out to make an actual banger of a third-person PvP shooter. I have to use Overwatch as a comparison because, for all intents and purposes, it’s Overwatch with a Marvel skin. Well, sort of.
The key difference is the switch-up from first-person to third-person, and to be quite honest, this feels a lot better. Overwatch was littered with fancy skins which you only saw in key moments during gameplay. In Rivals, you get to see them all the time, which, if you’re spending money to see these skins, is kind of a big deal.
The starting roster is already enjoyably large, with lots of your favourite Marvel characters involved. Some of the more obvious ones such as Iron Man, Hulk and Thor make an appearance, but then you have some not-so-well-known characters make an appearance too which is nice, such as Jeff the Baby Land Shark and Luna Snow.
I must have put about fifteen to twenty hours into Rivals so far and still didn’t manage to play the whole roster, trying to give ample time to the ones I did try. Surprisingly, despite being a fan of the big green guy, my go-to main quickly became the thunder goddess Storm. Her ability to stay in the air and hurl the elements at enemies from above just appealed to me. And when she drops her ultimate ability, oh man, things get messy. I was regularly dropping at least three to four enemies at a time in one fell swoop.
So yeah, much like Overwatch, ultimate abilities play a big part of matches, with them building up as you play, and then dropping them at key moments to pull back control from the enemy team. Most of them feel very well designed and perfect for the character pulling them off. One of my favourites was Magik, who, when activating her ultimate, transforms into the Darkchylde version of herself, dealing more damage with her attacks and abilities. Hulk’s ultimate works in a different way and is honestly brilliant. It works in stages; he starts as Banner and can immediately activate his ult from the beginning to ‘Hulk out’, then, charging the ultimate again lets him Hulk out even further, turning him into Monster Hulk, an even stronger version. During this mode, he gets an ultimate called World Breaker, which sees him do a move on a single enemy which you may have seen in a popular Avengers movie. It’s truly great!
During the Gamescom beta, NetEase threw two new characters into the mix, Captain America and the Winter Soldier. Cap felt as he should, quite defensive and a great support for the team. One of the games I had with him saw our team hold the enemy at their spawn point. Maybe we got lucky, but I felt Cap’s leadership skills helped. Winter Soldier on the other hand feels very strong. A little too strong at the moment. His ultimate has the chance to trigger multiple times and feels very oppressive. I’m not too worried about this now as there’s just over three months to release so he can be adjusted by then, but if he does release in that state… We are all in trouble.
He’s not the only character that needs adjusting as some do feel like auto-inclusions in team lineups and it would be nice to see a bit more variety. I lost account of the amount of Venoms and Doctor Stranges I would see on opposing teams.
As for the game modes, well, you’d be forgiven for thinking that you are playing Overwatch. It’s pretty egregious, but I’ll be honest, they pull it off well. It’s unapologetically similar, but it works so well and dare I say it, is done better here. Of course, it could use a little tuning to make sure things like the Overtime mechanic don’t last for ages but aside from that, it’s pretty much there.
The other big question on everyone’s lips is how will this game be monetized? Right now we don’t know. A battle pass system was put in place during both betas letting you unlock new cool skins for characters. Blizzard have been very aggressive with their monetisation to the point where the fan base has had enough. Corporate greed won the battle over at Blizzard and now players are being charged £20 and upwards for skins for their favourite heroes.
Nothing has been announced yet for Marvel Rivals but my fingers are crossed that NetEase doesn’t get too greedy, because Rivals has the potential to be amazing and bad monetisation practices have the potential to ruin the experience. Time will tell, but as always, I’ll remain hopeful.
Right now, Marvel Rivals has the potential to take up a lot of my time. I’m gagging to play more and the 6th of December cannot come soon enough.
