Marvel's Avengers (2020)

I've been pretty frustrated with this game. I've spent about a year and a half defending it from people who've either barely touched it or never played it at all and railed against it because it was a games as a service release. But man...the continued bugs, the lack of any real content, the content, when it comes, being literally recycled from other parts of the game. It's all starting to wear me down. Look at 2022, the entire year, and it boils down to this -

• Jane Foster - a clone of Thor with two different moves (yes she does play different, but she also plays very similar)
• A new villain sector starring a villain we've fought multiple times before in a recycled environment
• Cloning Labs, which will feature, you guessed it, a villain we've fought before who should have had his own villain sector or raid from day 1 instead of 2+ years later (it's MODOK)
• Bucky Barnes, who will 100% be a recycled Black Widow with a few moves from Cap

The only new assets this team has even designed are the appearances of Bucky and Jane, and the cosmetic team, the real heroes of this game and the only ones keeping it alive, probably designed those anyway!

At this point, I feel like there are three people working on this game outside of the cosmetic team, and what they do day in and day out is a mystery because it sure isn't creating content. And it sure isn't fixing bugs. And so I wonder if they, like myself, simply spend all day arguing on reddit and not actually doing their jobs. I had high hopes when this team took over because they talked a good game. They seemed to care about continuing Avengers into the future and giving us the game we want. Sadly, they've done absolutely nothing.

But am I going to keep playing? Of course I am because no other game feels this good to play day in and day out. The core experience remains very satisfying, but that could fizzle any time now. I've almost max leveled every character I care about, so that might be it.

Sunk a whole day into avengers and I have mixed feelings so far. It's not as bad as I'd heard but that might be because I went into this wanting the game to be good.

The game has a lot of potential and the campaign so far has had some enjoyable set pieces. The problems I can see coming to the surface though are the lackluster level designs, the bullet sponge enemies, and how focused the game is on loot.

I can see myself getting bored with the combat after a few days and then what will be left for me to enjoy? I hope that playing with friends will bring some further enjoyment. I feel like an open world avengers game with co-op would have been a much better fit for this game

I can't help but compare Marvel's Avengers (2020) to Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order (2019) and feel extremely disappointed in the 2020 version.

Both games are beat-em-ups with 4 player coop, featuring a large cast of Avengers and ancillary characters, running through fairly linear maps fighting from combat arena to combat arena. The games have skill unlocks and equipable items and ultimate attacks and snarky dialogue.

However Ultimate Alliance's enemies include super powered humans, demons, ninjas, sentinels, rock monsters, and more. The bosses include Sandman, Kingpin, Thanos, Magneto, Dormamu, Klaw, Nebula, Hela, Ultimo and others. The Avengers get to travel to the X Mansion, the Dark Dimension, the Raft, Attilan, Wakanda, Avengers Tower, Knowhere and several other fantastical and interesting set pieces. Ultimate Alliance is definitely built as more of a theme park ride with a loose plot to allow you to revisit Marvel's greatest hits, but there is a ton of variety in all the content it has to offer And that doesn't include the multiple DLC packs they added post launch.

Meanwhile the 2020 Avenger's seems to go minimalist with boring robot bad guys fighting to protect generic base in the middle of the forest, or protecting generic base in the middle of the desert. It is so painfully obvious when I compare the two games how paltry the content in the 2020 version is.

The 2020 game does have a more meaningful story to tell through the eyes of a young and inexperienced Ms. Marvel, which is worth trudging through the bland battles to see. But there is clearly so much more they could have done with the game.