Last fall, Crystal Dynamics and Square-Enix’s Avengers game released to middling critical reception. Despite the huge brand attached, (notice how everything I write here eventually comes back to superheroes?), the game was moved-on-from by the general gaming public. Incoming revisions to the leveling system and some new content are hoping to turn perceptions of the game around and revitalize is disgruntled and disparate player base.
One of the weirder parts of this reinvention the game is going through is that the game itself actually plays really well. But before we talk about that, let’s talk about the story, which is somehow stronger than the gameplay loop.
The opening level will never get old
In a world without mutants, a sabotaged Avengers Helicarrier with an experimental power supply explodes and inadvertently creates a new race of powered people in the world known as Inhumans. Following their failure to stop the explosion, the Avengers disband, and a familiar looking group known as A.I.M. comes in to oversee the transition of power from Avengers/Stark-tech to a new, fascistic world order. You start playing as Kamala Khan, a huge Avengers super-fan who eventually earns the title of Ms. Marvel thanks to her bravery, wit, persistence, and ability. The campaign is basically the best part of every heist movie - you’re reassembling the Avengers and putting together a crew strong enough to stop AIM and restore the world to the way it should be. More heist movies should just be putting your team together. Ocean’s 11 could’ve been 45 minutes shorter and just as good.
Each of the heroes I’ve played as handle differently but they all feel powerful in their own ways. There’s some overlap between certain characters, but it never results in feeling like a redundancy, at least it won’t until new characters arrive (more on that in a bit). The game can be a little lonely in the beginning, not just because you probably won’t be playing with any of your friends for the first 30% of the game or so, but because it takes a few missions for you to build a roster and bring other heroes along with you to help you free Inhumans and stop AIM. Even the AI taking control goes a long way towards making you feel like you’re on a team with heavy hitters. They’ll help you get to areas you couldn’t on your own, and they’ll revive you when you fall.
“Embiggening” would’ve been Oxford’s 2020 word of the year if it weren’t for… well, you know.
Also, it’s worth noting that the game itself is drop-dead gorgeous. it was rumored to be in development for a long time before it was eventually shown and released and you can see the back-breaking hours the developers put into the game. Enemy animation cycles are fluid, they look like they belong in a world with Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, and they look intimidating. It doesn’t matter how tough you are, even the basic enemies can do some work on you if you let them. The heroes impressively look even better, each having little idiosyncrasies reflected in their fighting styles. Kamala acts like a teenager when she fights, you can see she’s having a ball while stomping out these techno-fascists. Hulk is angrier than usual, his rage is slightly more quiet and controlled when he throws his punches until he cuts lose and really lets someone have it. Stark is incredibly deliberate, seeking redemption with every repulsor blast, and every rocket-powered uppercut.
Playing the game feels great. Looking at the game feels great. Letting the story of the game wash over you feels great. But it’s not a great game. Here’s why:
I can feel myself getting stuffed into a locker just looking at this
Avengers is too nerdy for its own good. To be a game-as-a-service, it had to create game systems that would sink its claws into people and get them to come back everyday. While games like this can absolutely be played for 10 hours at a time, they’re made to be played for like an hour or two a day. Go in, do the missions, get the gear, and incrementally improve your heroes.
But what that game system means is that it takes a lot of work to get your heroes where fans of the movies, comics, cartoons, or whatever, feel they should be. On top of that, the multiplayer is meant to make sense, so you can’t have two Hulks running around the same level. This is being mitigated with overlapping characters (where that aforementioned non-redundancy gets thrown out the window) so you’re not losing time investing in one character just never play as them with your friends. Got a friend who wants to play as Hawkeye? That’s cool, you can play as Kate Bishop, the cooler Hawkeye. No offense, Clint, but you’re boring. Since no Game-as-a-service has really had that issue before, that’s one problem taken care of, but the bigger problem of this game being so nerdy can’t be as easily solved.
There are so many resources that you can collect throughout the game that all power up different gear making your heroes more powerful. That’s not to be confused with leveling your character up, unlocking new abilities, and making your heroes more powerful. Every safe-haven you unlock opens up a new store where you can use your resources to buy equipment, exchange resources for other resources, get new quests that you can complete and exchange for you, you guessed—resources. There are so many micro-economies in the game which extend the life of gameplay and that’s fine because as previously stated, the game is fun to play and designed to be played everyday, but it’s a needless layer of obfuscation that’s been added on top of a fun core for the sake of making the Avengers into a type of game it probably shouldn’t have been.
Throw your shield, get it back, kick it over there. You got yourself a stew goin’.
I’ve played a lot of Anthem, Desinty/2, The Division/2, and other games that lie somewhere between game-as-a-service and MMO. What they all have in common is that they take a mechanic or genre and stretch it out to make sense in a daily model. Destiny 2 is one of the best first person shooters you can play today, and the RPG woven into it does a good job of giving you flexibility in your character and adapting to whatever the situation needs. The Division 2 is a great third person shooter where increasingly powerful and steady loot drops improve your character to take on bigger and badder bosses. Anthem… was soulless, but it was the first month of the pandemic and I couldn’t sleep, so there was that. What makes Destiny and Division successful was that they came from a very video-game place and added layers that caught no one by surprise. They were appealing to video game fans and offering them more.
Avengers was appealing to movie fans and offered them a mess of menus, resources, location-specific stores, and a whole litany of other things that should’ve been smoothed out. The game had the benefit of coming out well after all these games and seemed to learn nothing from how to simplify their structure into something that would appeal to a mass audience. There are people who just like first person shooters, and there are people who just like tactical cover shooters. The people who like The Avengers like action games, but really they like heroes smashing things. They don’t like spending 40% of the time in a convoluted menu micromanaging +1 modifiers to defense while emphasizing a ranged build for a character.
The Avengers nails its gameplay but fails to adequately interpolate the economy of a persistent game into a brand as widely loved as The Avengers. The average person who picked up the game isn’t going to care about having enough ISO-8 to fully power up the wristband they have for the Hulk, they’re just going to be pissed that they don’t have a fully-powered up Hulk. Avengers had a real opportunity to give audiences a game that was infinitely repayable but simplified in a way that spoke to every person who saw Endgame in theaters. The movies did the impossible and made the Avengers cool and fun. The game went out of its way to make them neither.
Which sucks because I love playing it. I just hate everything I have to do to keep playing it.