Marvel’s Avengers | PS4 Review

Marvel is an absolute powerhouse brand in the world right now, easily one of the biggest. Every single day, you see some form of Marvel merchandise. It’s a wonder, then, that it’s taken Disney so long to bring their properties into the modern AAA sphere. There’s a lot riding on Avengers, especially with how large Square Enix seems to be gambling on it.

Avengers Assemble

Crystal Dynamics is one of the top-tier studios in video games right now. Their Tomb Raider reboots took the slowly dying franchise right back into the mainstream. Their expertise lies in story driven action-adventure games, and they have excelled in this regard so far. Avengers is a tale of two games, but before we talk about the “games as a service” trappings, let’s talk about what it does well.

The campaign is a really great 12-15 hour romp featuring some of the most iconic characters in fiction. The story centers around Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan), and this was the best decision Crystal Dynamics could have made. Kamala is the Marvel fangirl inside all of us, and her excitement at seeing The Avengers is our excitement made manifest. I’m not sure the story could’ve worked without her heart and charm.

Earth’s Mightiest Heroes

The game kicks off with a disaster that kills a great number of people, and turns even more into Inhumans, such as Kamala herself. Inhumans go through a painful, forced metamorphosis that gives these former humans a superpower. Unfortunately, not everyone survives the process and it is remarkably painful either way. This cataclysm is blamed on The Avengers, and they’re forced to disband. Five years later, we pick up as the budding Ms. Marvel while she quests to reunite these now downtrodden heroes.

Kamala’s enthusiasm is infectious from the beginning, but early in the game she meets Bruce Banner, and Avengers shows the kind of story it really is. There are a lot of soft, tender moments (especially with Kamala and Bruce), and The Avengers themselves are much truer to their comic book counterparts than the movies often are. Jokes and banter still exist and produce more than a few good laughs, but the exquisite voice cast really nails the dramatic scenes. I bought into the dynamics of these characters, and they really felt like people that’ve known each other for some time.

The story wraps up on what feels very much like a first act. As good as it is, it notably feels incomplete with many loose threads and nothing much resolved other than reassembling the core team. That’s because Avengers has a second game afterwards, the “Avengers Initiative,” which is a really fancy way of saying live-service multiplayer.

It’s an Avengers World

I was, and am, quite shocked by how much of this content has a story. Nothing has been anywhere near as good as the main campaign, but even the morsels of plot you get is more tantalizing than other live-service games. Part of it is that you brought this team together in the campaign, so it’s easy to invest in even the smallest of narrative breadcrumbs. You’ve seen Thor be a hothead many times already, so you understand and empathize during his questline dealing with a Thor imposter.

While the main campaign has a lot of variety in environments, the Avengers Initiative absolutely does not. There are a handful of openish areas to explore, with very repetitive side content such as finding strongboxes of loot or Inhuman hostages to rescue. Invariably you will enter some secret laboratory and go through several floors of enemies as you find the objective and hold square to summon even more enemies. The single-player campaign has several areas for interesting traversal and puzzles, but this is not so in the live-service portion. It’s all an excuse for more combat. Lots and lots of combat.

One was Life, and One was Death

Combat in Avengers is some of the most mindless you could find in modern gaming. It’s actually quite in the vein of old school beat-em-ups. Enemies come at you in huge waves, and your job is to press light and heavy attacks until they die. Some enemies can block, but otherwise it’s always a battle of attrition. Your job is crowd mitigation, whether from up-close or afar. You smash attack until the cooldowns on your special attacks reset; rinse and repeat.

It’s almost the textbook definition of “fine.” Each character’s ultimate ability is pretty cool, whether it’s Iron Man summoning a Hulkbuster or Ms. Marvel using her stretchy power to “embiggen” herself and become giant. The powers are fun to unleash and very true to their power sets, but you can’t help but feel like you’re going through the motions.

There Was an Idea…

Credit where it’s due, Crystal Dynamics has done an admirable job of making each Avenger play fairly differently. When my boredom bottomed out with one character, I would switch to another and feel refreshed. Black Widow is lithe and quick, with handy dual pistols, whereas Hulk feels appropriately weighty. Each character has their own skill tree with a wide variety of skills to unlock, and it’s pretty fun making each Avenger feel like your own take on them. Praising a skill tree is a rare thing for me to do, but I must commend it as satisfying here. Leveling up actually takes significant time, which helps make each skill point feel like it counts. What’s more is that you can’t have every skill active at the same time, so you have to make careful decisions.

We’re in the Endgame Now

Less exciting is the gear system. I would border on calling it entirely useless. I assume the gear will come more into play at the endgame as raids are introduced, but as it stands in my few dozen hours with the game, it’s been a complete afterthought. You cycle through so much gear so quickly, it would be a waste of time and resources to invest in any single piece. Each item increases one of four stats, but with the rapidity of getting better gear, your best bet is to just pick the one that increases the most numbers. There’s no thinking to be had, no engagement from the player, outside of the potential endorphins of watching a number get big.

The categories of gear are also just bizarre in-universe: How in the hell am I switching out Hulk’s spinal cord so often? Why are robots dropping bracelets? There’s no cosmetic differences to these items, either, though that’s likely for the best. Iron Man would look a lot less intimidating if his armor was hodgepodged together from different metals and colors. There are many, many cosmetic outfits to wear, however. These can range from a simple palette swap to legendary costumes from the comics. Any superhero fan gets a kick from costumes in adaptations of our beloved icons, and Avengers is no different. You could even pay a laughably egregious amount of money ($20 for ONE costume) for your favorite skin, if you’re so inclined.

Everything Dies

Another failing of Avengers is the technical performance. Bugs don’t typically grate on me as I play through video games, but this one’s a bit of a doozy. The framerate struggled constantly on my PS4 Pro, and texture pop-in was more common than not. A few times poor Kamala even lost her hair texture in cutscenes. Enemies will disappear through floors, a specific item in the helicarrier hub would vanish each time I used it, and there are many other distracting bugs throughout. It’s a rocky start, but nothing that won’t be patched.

Avengers is such a difficult game for me to review. It really is two very different games. The campaign is pretty great, only undermined by the fact it’s clearly the beginning of a story. The games as a service aspect is off to an interesting start having so much narrative content, but it’s going to live or die by the frequency of story updates. The war zones and repeatable missions aren’t engaging enough on their own at all. Each character’s challenge card, with daily and weekly quests to complete, gives your actions some meaning. These unlock cosmetic items exclusive to the challenge card as you play in varying game modes. I was shocked at how nice an incentive I found it, but I’m not sure it would get me to play on its own.

Everything Lives

I want to believe in Avengers, but the future is murky. The foundation is solid, their promise of frequent story updates building up over years is an actual dream come true if it delivers, and the characters are well-represented and fun. But the game feels like it has a case of personality disorder right now. The product is solid as it stands, but it’s impossible not to wonder where it’ll go. The game is obsessed with its future, so how could we not be? I know I want to keep playing Avengers, but I hope the game can keep up its end of the bargain.

To hear me talk more about Marvel’s Avengers, be sure to listen to Episode 311 of The Gaming Outsider Podcast.

This review is based on a PS4 copy of Marvel’s Avengers provided by fortyseven for coverage purposes. It is also available on Xbox One, Windows PC, and Google Stadia with next-gen versions coming at a later time.