Marvel's Avengers

Marvel's Avengers
Even Thanos himself would snap this game out of existence.
Protagonist(s): Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel Avengers Steve Rogers/Captain America Tony Stark/Iron Man Thor Odinson Bruce Banner/Hulk Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow Post-Launch Heroes Kate Bishop/Hawkeye II (Taking A.I.M./Future Imperfect/Cosmic Cube) Clint Barton/Hawkeye I (Taking A.I.M./Future Imperfect/Cosmic Cube) T’Challa/Black Panther (War for Wakanda) Peter Parker/Spider-Man (With Great Power PS4/PS5 exclusive) Genre(s): Action-adventure Role-playing Platform(s): Microsoft Windows PlayStation 4 Stadia Xbox One PlayStation 5 Xbox Series X/S Release: Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Stadia, Xbox One September 4, 2020 PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S March 18, 2021 Engine: Foundation Engine Developer(s): Crystal Dynamics Publisher(s): Square Enix Country: United States Canada Netherlands Series: Marvel

Marvel's Avengers is an action-adventure game developed by Crystal Dynamics and published by Square Enix Europe in 2020. The game was delisted in September 30, 2023.

Plot

Marvel's Avengers takes place five years after a day dedicated to the Avengers called "A-Day", which went disastrously after mass destruction happened, and the Avengers were forced into hiding after being framed. Since then, superheroes have been made illegal, with an organization known as A.I.M. taking their place. After discovering that A.I.M. seeks to kill every superhero, the Avengers reassembles to stop them from carrying out their plans and prove they're not the bad guys everyone now views them as.

Bad Qualities

1. The game is riddled with microtransactions in the form of poor-looking cosmetics, cards, and moves.
   • Some of the cosmetics cost up to thousands of in-game credits, which can be up to $14 just for one outfit.
   • Some of the cosmetics are also blatant product placement, such as the costumes designed after Verizon.
   • You could even get some of these cosmetics using codes from specifically marked packets of "5 Gum" at your local supermarkets.
   • This is all on top of the base game already costing $60 at launch.
   • In October 2021, the game began selling XP boosters even though the devs promised they wouldn't. Thankfully, this feature was removed a month later.
2. Many of the missions are similar to each other, with the players having to from point A to point B and defeat the same set of enemies. This, combined with the combat being as generic as they come, will quickly make the game repetitive.
   • The lack of enemy variety won't help matters.
   • Like most other generic looter-shooters, most enemies are bullet sponges, making combat longer than it needs to be.
   • The same bosses will also be fought over and over again.
3. The game offers daily challenges, but this gets boring fast due to the lack of content and repetitiveness.
4. Loot in this game is downright pathetic as most of them are either going to be obsolete or weak to the point Anthem and Destiny's RNG look generous.
   • Speaking of loot, there is no point in it since it doesn't even show up on a single character. The only purpose it has is to increase a character's power.
5. The cutscenes drag on for too long, not helping is that they're also uneventful for the most part.
6. Although interesting, the story feels clichéd, where the antagonistic faction is seen as the good guys and the heroes are seen as the bad guys. There's also conflict between the heroes throughout the story, but a bunch of it feels forced.
7. Collecting challenge cards for the heroes takes a long time, and the rewards the players get for collecting them are mostly disappointing.
8. With the exception of Kamala Khan, most of the characters are lacking in personality, especially when compared to their comics and MCU counterparts. An example of one of the characters lacking in personality is Bruce Banner, who is reduced from a smart and brilliant man to a coward who would rather hide and believes the Avengers are a threat.
   • Their designs are also rather cheap looking, resembling someone in poor cosplay than actual superheroes.
     • Abomination, for instance, rather looks like a cheap version of Killer Croc.
9. The game suffers from poor optimization with the addition of many bugs as glitches are common, such as the models of the heroes glitching out when customizing them in the menu.
   • When hitting an enemy, there's a chance they'll go flying in the wrong direction.
   • Enemies will sometimes not make any sounds when in combat.
   • The frame rate is abysmal as it can drop way below 30fps. It's so bad that it almost makes the game unplayable; in fact, there's even frame rate dips in the credits!
   • Long loading screens, even for very short missions.
10. Clunky UI that places the icons and objectives all over the screen.
11. There is a ton of shaky-cam and incredibly thick motion blur during combat segments, which will not do players who suffer from motion sickness any favors; worst part is that (upon release) neither of them could be turned off. This was later fixed via patch. Unfortunately, the spinning camera glitch still remains.
12. The graphics, while they don't look inherently bad, are rather outdated looking, comparable to a late 7th gen or an early 8th gen game. Texture pop-in is also common.
13. Unoriginal environments that are seen in tons of other games, with many of those games executing them better.
    • There's also a lot of out-of-place feeling platforms and other structures that can be found throughout the game.
14. Slow camera that trails behind a lot during combat, especially when the combat gets pretty chaotic.
15. The heroes' AI when they're NPCs is terrible, with them often doing nothing to help out the player.
16. Awkward walking and running animations for the heroes.
17. Some monotonous voice acting, with some voices not matching their characters at all such as Captain America's voice.
    • All of the NPCs, companions and enemies alike, never shut up during gameplay, which can also get distracting.
18. There's a surprising lack of villains for an Avengers game with only 4 villains in the entire game, 3 of those villains being boss fights. At least with Insomniac's Spider-Man there are 12 villains to fight against (excluding henchmen).
    • Two of those villains, Taskmaster and Abomination, do not make any appearance throughout the story after they are defeated. They do make appearances in Villain Sectors, but what was the point in having those two villains in the story if they're just going to be reduced to the villain sectors?
19. Because of the player base declining shortly after release, matchmaking and finding other players is difficult.
20. Unless you play the game on PlayStation, you will not be able to play as Spider-Man as he is a PlayStation exclusive character. Though it can be argued that Sony owns the movie rights to Spider-Man, his inclusion on Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 which was a Nintendo Switch exclusive, renders that statement meaningless.
    1. Due to him being exclusive to the PlayStation versions, Spider-Man doesn't come with any story missions, making him feel more like a random character DLC.
21. The promised DLC content didn't release on time, and they keep delaying the DLC more and more, most likely because of the game's buggy state. Because of this, people began to point out that something similar happened with EA's Anthem where they made a roadmap for DLC, but because of the game's issues the roadmap was derailed.
22. If you quit playing the game at any point before reassembling the team, the game will spoiler certain aspects like Captain America being alive. This is because when relaunching the game it will not continue the campaign, but instead switch to a hub inside the now repaired Chimera with all the Avengers reassembled as if the game skipped several levels. However, when accessing the War Table you can continue the campaign like nothing happened.
23. There is a limit of only 2 revives. If you use up all of those revives and get defeated, you will be sent back to the checkpoint while you have to start a HARM Challenge all over again. While this would make sense for online multiplayer, it doesn't make any sense for single-player, and it feels more like a punishment for those who wants to play the game alone.
24. Ultimately, there's no way to play this game anymore, as it was delisted on September 30, 2023.

Good Qualities

1. The more creative missions that don't involve simply going somewhere and defeating enemies can be enjoyable.
2. A lot of graphical settings to choose from, with the game giving you previews to help in seeing the difference.
3. Despite some oddities, most of the voice acting is decent such as Sandra Saad as Kamala Khan.
4. Although the combat is mostly poor, the heroes' attacks are well animated and can be fun to use.
5. While it isn't particularly special, the soundtrack is good and has a cinematic feeling to it.
6. Each hero has a different fighting style during combat, which can help reduce repetitiveness.
   • They also have some interesting skills that can be enjoyable to use and experiment with.
7. Despite the problems with the story, it is pretty decent, and has some memorable moments.
8. More heroes are added through free DLC.
9. At least, this games better than Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.

Reception

Marvel's Avengers was met with mixed reception from critics, and mostly negative reception from gamers. On Metacritic, the game has a Metascore of 70/100 for the PC and PS4 versions, and a 63/100 for the Xbox One version ("mixed or average reviews" for all three versions). The user scores were a 3.8/10 for the PC, a 5.6/10 for the PS4, and a 4.0/10 for the Xbox One.

AngryJoe initially gave it a 5/10 but dropped it down to a 4/10, criticizing the gameplay calling it boring, how buggy it is, and how it reeks of corporate saying that it "feels like a corporate satire of superheroes like Amazon's The Boys". The game was ranked #2 on "Top 10 MOST DISAPPOINTING Games of 2020!" and #3 on "Top 10 WORST Games of 2020!" videos.

Marvel's Avengers was such a commercial failure that Square Enix lost about $63 million because of the game's poor sales (something that Square Enix chose not to reveal).

The game was so bad that it's director, Shaun Escayeg, quit Crystal Dynamics to return to Naughty Dog. Square Enix later admitted that Crystal Dynamics was ill-suited for the game and its "game as a service" model.

It is said by people that the huge failure of this game, along with their shifting interest in NFTs and Cryptocurrency is what caused Square Enix to sell Crystal Dynamics, Eidos-Montréal and Square Enix Montreal to Embracer Group in May 2022.

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