Marvel's Avengers by Square Enix

[Kchrpm]

After sinking some hours into this game, I am on board. The combat is fun and gives you a lot of options to unlock and use. Those options fulfill the power fantasy on cannon fodder enemies, force you to figure out the right combination of them on tough enemies, and gives you a lot of both to deal with on every mission. It's better at the melee bits than the shooting bits, but maybe the aiming would be better with some tweaks to the default aim speed/etc.

The gear you unlock have different perks which one review said were just numbers, but in actually playing you can see how they can have you play differently and see different things happen. In addition to stuff that just deals extra damage over time, you can slow enemies down, shrink them, stun them so that you can do a takedown move (which does a ton of damage and gives you some health), and others I don't fully understand yet.

It helps of course that I'm a big fan of the license, and this style of power-fantasy melee game in general.

Jason and I ran into some bugs that were getting worse near the end, but hopefully those will be ironed out quickly enough. This is a major release with a long tail planned (though as we saw with Anthem that doesn't always work out).

Anyone else thinking of/planning on diving in?

[Alan P]

Any idea if it's crossplay?

[Kchrpm]

Across generations, but not platforms. PS5 and PS4 players can play together, XBox One and XBox Series _ can play together, but that's it.

[Jason]

You are largely going to be talking to yourself in this thread :P

[Kchrpm]

Eh, if no one else is interested, I won't even bother talking in it for very long, but wanted to see :)

[Rare White Ape]

I’ve purposefully stayed out of this thread because I have nothing nice to say about the game…

[Kchrpm]

Having spent several hours over the last couple days playing this game, I am finding it, for the most part, incredibly enjoyable. The campaign story was fun, Kamala is a great character, and the core combat loop gives you so many different options spread across all of the characters. Dropping in to an area to do a mission, exploring around to find side stuff of varying complexity and difficulty, some indicated on your map and some not, gives you plenty to do, and it's fun mowing down the cannon fodder enemies and outsmarting/overpowering the tough enemies. It does a poor job when it decides to make an area "hard", though, by spawning too many enemies with too many different abilities that instead of being able to counter you're basically constantly running and dodging until you can find a place to hide and take out one enemy at a time. Also there are a couple of enemy types that drain your special ability meters with unblockable attacks or long range shots, which really hampers your ability to fight back.

There are bugs as well, which unfortunately seems common for the launch of a game like this with an engine based on refillable content and varying amounts of online teammates. They vary in severity, and I haven't had any of the game/save eating ones, just ones that required reloading a checkpoint or mission, or prevented a mission from starting correctly in co-op.

Hopefully as they keep adding content, the bugs will get ironed out, new characters and their content will be at the same level of quality as the current stuff, and they do a better job of handling difficulty. Other than one understandable example, the boss fights are pretty satisfying, and the "puzzles" to unlock doors have been nice.

The game isn't perfect, but it has turned out better than I expected it to at any point before release. And what is effectively the tutorial level, before the bridge action in the beta, was probably my favorite of any game's.

[Kchrpm]

Now that Jason and I have gotten max skills on a couple of characters, it's becoming clearer that they give you a lot of tools to deal with the crazy difficulty spike moments, but since so much of the content just says that it's scaling to your power level (stats and perks from gear) but nothing about the suggested character level (moves and abilities unlocked by leveling up with XP), it's hard to realize early on that, even though the game says certain missions are always the right difficulty, they actually aren't.