Marvel Rivals review

I feel like I spend every moment of my free time playing hero shooter games these days. When I’m not fighting for my life in Valorant, I’m doing the same in Overwatch 2. The last thing I need is a hero shooter that I really enjoy and therefore will spend more time playing: enter Marvel Rivals.

I didn’t expect to be drawn into Marvel Rivals so quickly, but I’m having fun working my way through the lineup of 33 starter heroes divided into three classes: Vanguard, Duel, and Strategist (Tank, DPS, and Support), each of which also includes unique “team” abilities. , activated by building the appropriate team composition. I’m focusing on Hawkeye, which I’m embarrassed to admit considering how forceful he is right now, and that doesn’t even take into account Black Widow’s ability to team up, which gives him a 20% damage escalate.

It’s always fun to put yourself through the wringer with a novel hero shooter, especially on a confused start. At first I couldn’t tell who was hitting you and where. I spent a lot of time getting shot in the back by Ankh Moon Knight, who could lay down and then deflect the bullets. It doesn’t matter if you’re behind a wall or you can’t even see the Moon Knight, he’ll find a way to get to you.

I finally managed to pick up the sound of Ankh Moonknight as he deflected the darts, and it became second nature to destroy him before he tried to run for cover. There are a lot of these little learning curves to master, and many of them will be familiar to Overwatch veterans.

There’s nothing better than reflexively putting an enemy Scarlet Witch and Mantis to sleep before she uses her ultimate, or pushing away a diving Wolverine without a second thought before it can dig its claws into you. There are many intuitive skills and counter-attacks available in Marvel Rivals – you just need to take the time and patience to learn them.

Getting to know each of the eight starting maps is also a lot of fun. Rival maps are one of the game’s most distinctive features, as battlefields change throughout the match either through energetic destruction or customized map events. This is a good way to spice up the match, but it can also be used to tip the scales in your favor. For example, if there’s a particular spot where the Black Widow player likes to perch, chances are you’ll be able to blow them up for a few seconds to destroy that vantage point. Unfortunately, the map will refresh from time to time, so it’s best to keep an eye out for that pesky Black Widow.

Even though I thought I was losing my mind when walls kept appearing in front of me on Klyntar, it turns out that the walls of the map periodically shift and literally change their layout, a bit like the Clockwork Mansion in Dishonored 2. This can be a blessing and a blessing, as sometimes it can cut off long lines of sight, which can protect attacking teams, but also means you sometimes have to change the angle.

Too much of a good thing

Starting with 33 heroes is a bold move, considering most other hero shooters start with a smaller roster that’s easier for novel players to digest, before expanding over time. That character selection screen is a bit daunting, but the wide-ranging list is also great because it means there’s something for everyone.

You have your plain heroes like Black Widow and Hawkeye, heroes that focus solely on aiming skills that rely on hitting players in the head, the Punisher is the beginner-friendly Soldier 76 with an assault rifle, and tanks like Groot and Magneto that simply place shields and gradually wear out the front line.

Then, on the slightly more complicated side, you have your speedy heroes like Iron Fist, Psylocke, and Spider-Man. These heroes are a little more challenging to understand, but it’s high risk and high reward because I don’t think there’s anything scarier than a truly talented Spider-Man player.

Marvel Rivals manages to cater to most sections of hero shooter players by offering characters with varying skill levels and goals. You can hide in the back, shoot or heal, or be in the middle of the battle, running or tearing down walls with brute force. On the other hand, this huge roster of heroes is also the undoing of Marvel Rivals: there are now tons of completely eliminated heroes. Hawkeye is a one-shot headshot for duelists and strategists, while Jeff the Shark is capable of devouring entire teams of players and blast yourself and everyone off the map in one go. Dominant heroes and instakill tricks are currently considered amusing and meme-worthy in the honeymoon stage of Marvel Rivals, but they soon devolve into annoyances – conversations that gamer crowds will sharpen their pitchforks from. Dr. Strange’s team-killing teleportation tactics are already starting to wear lean – if I have to watch my team helplessly flee the map one more time, I’m seriously going to lose them.

Balancing your hero lineup is probably one of the most challenging things a live-action hero shooter has to deal with, and Marvel Rivals has made things unnecessarily complicated by starting with so many players rather than drips. However, NetEase is probably more interested in filling Marvel Rivals with lots of fun heroes rather than ones that are more balanced out of the box. It’s an unconventional approach, but it could work in the long run if NetEase rolls up its sleeves quickly enough.

Duelists everywhere

Similar to unbalanced heroes, there are an odd number of heroes in each class. The problem is that in a game that requires an even number of roles – usually two vanguards, two duelists and two strategists or something similar – if you have twice as many duelists as strategists and vanguards combined, chances are that most teams after he’ll just do it. consist of duelists.

The worst matches I’ve experienced in Marvel Rivals have been when no one else is willing to shut down the duelist, so we just get completely outplayed by the opposing team, which has a balanced lineup of vanguard, duelist, and strategist. I can play Strategic Rocket Racoon all I like, but if I’m stuck with a team full of duels, we won’t get very far.

This is something Overwatch has struggled with since merging the offensive and defensive DPS roles. Since then, fueling and support have been a secondary issue for many years until recently when they started trying to equalize the classes. So I thought this headache was something Marvel Rivals would have wanted to avoid from the beginning by creating classes with a similar number of champions, but it looks like I was wrong. So unbalanced team composition will likely remain a common problem until a role queue is added to the game or the faint ones give up and commit to a vanguard or strategist.

Let’s hope that balance issues and an uncertain team composition won’t burden Marvel Rivals – my despondent attitude may simply be a sign of fatigue after years of playing Overwatch 2. I really hope that the developers manage to level the playing field a bit more so that Marvel Rivals can handle seeing the same success it had in its launch week. But for now, at least I’ll enjoy the chaos of an unbalanced game while it’s still fun, and reap the rewards of running as a Hawkeye and getting more picks than anyone else, with the reward being my MVP award at the end of the game.