Marvel Rivals is a 6v6 team matchup MOBA shooter game that aims to recapture the lost vitality of Overwatch (2016) and transport it into 2014 with a cast of heroes you love and know along with maps designed to be highly destructible and composed mainly in a way that makes gameplay dynamic and adaptable.

It's a shame the game doesn't have its own identity: past the Marvel character design that sets it apart from Overwatch 2, Valorant and other games of the genre, Marvel Rivals aims mainly for the crowd that misses the gameplay mechanics of Overwatch (2016), adding to its roster of heroes many "unforgettable" abilities that were once a staple of Overwatch's older cast (such as scatter arrows, dragon's sight, Symmetra's latching ray) all the while forgetting that the game it's trying to appeal to was a labor of almost a decade's worth of patch, nerfs and buffs.

I am decidedly not a fan of the choices they made to basically reinstate what had been changed and some of the most broken abilities that they decided to charge some of these heroes with:

• Jeff has a long ult that swallows up enemies and friends alike, causing damage to enemies for the length and duration. He's able to spit these people up wherever he wants, most often at a cliff (not all heroes have a glide or a way to get back on solid ground, so it's almost often a guaranteed kill). He can also kill himself to guarantee a kill on everyone he is carrying with him.

• All tanks have 800hp, at least one way to get a self shield and some of them have leech/health regen. Coupled with heals, they become almost and nearly unkillable and can do some serious damage if paired with the right supports. Some of them do extreme amounts of damage.

• Moon Knight can shoot an ankh and freely shoot within it to get the most amount of people without aiming, making the little blades he throws bounce between enemies and ankh and causing a lot of damage. The Ankhs are vaguely visible in more crowded maps (such as Asgard's) and can be thrown to almost be hidden in objects - not by design of the player, but that's a critical lack of design on the game's part.

• Scarlet Witch has a short duration float+invisibility, a small AoE stun, Symmetra's latching laser gun, a long range attack and a D.Va ult that is not parsed on the ground and has a vaguely mid-to-large radius and will one-shot most of the enemies within it minus a high health tank.

• Iron Man can float indefinitely off the ground and into the air, making him a visible target to people unless he hides in the trees. He can just keep shooting at will and there's little to no stopping him. His E empowers the right-click laser beam that can chunk a tank.

• Adam Warlock has a self-revive and a smaller revive.

• Rocket Racoon has a smaller revive, ammo boosts (if teamed up with Groot or Starlord can become infinite ammo boost).

There's more here to go on but they are compounded with NetEase's extremely poor capabilities of handling cheaters and netcode issues: sometimes you'll get your ult off only for it to miss some people because they are hiding behind a semi column that wasn't completely destroyed or has some wonky geomapping. Sometimes you'll get stuck trying to fly between the boasted "destroyable map" pieces and get killed by the enemy. Sometimes you'll be able to avoid a Jeff ult by being on top of a turret but sometimes you can't by being on top of any other thing that isn't Punisher's turret. Sometimes doing certain actions, such as being locked in animation, makes you impervious to certain types of ults that would otherwise kill you and stun you.

The maps can be a toss up: they can be open, they can be too cramped, they can offer a one lane corridor in which to choke the enemy or way too many escape points from which you cannot physically see the enemy coming unless they're already in your face. Sometimes they're way too cluttered, sometimes they offer destroyable vantage points and sometimes they offer unbreakable vantage points that can make or break a game.

I wish this game had its own identity because so far it's poorly mimicking Overwatch (2016) and failing spectacularly. Cheating is rampant, the heroes are a mass of homogenous messes in which their unbalanced perks do not cancel each other out to make a balanced game.

Avoid it like the plague, play something else. Overwatch 2, despite my distaste for it, it's still more functional than Marvel Rivals.

I want to preface this review by saying that I'm not really a Marvel fan. The last Marvel film I watched was Black Panther, and I think before that it was Avengers: Age of Ultron. So while this game feels like quite a loving heap of fan service, I'm not really well equipped to review it from that front.

I am, however, a hero shooter aficionado. From the genre's origins in Team Fortress 2, to 1,300 regrettable hours in Overwatch/Overwatch 2, I can say I've been there and back when it comes to this genre. Marvel Rivals is far from the first title to challenge Overwatch's status as the top dog hero shooter, but it is decidedly the first to keep me coming back for more.

Other hero shooters that I've played, such as Paladins and Gundam Evolution, were competent but did not do anything better than Blizzard's much more polished offering. The ones that had more staying power with me were titles such as Apex Legends that blended hero shooter elements into other genres. But Marvel Rivals is the first pure hero shooter to match and even surpass Overwatch in the most important element of the genre: the heroes themselves.

Of course, it's cheating. Marvel Rivals is drawing from a storied catalogue of iconic character designs. Even as a non-fan, it's a joy to play as these interpretations of well known characters such as Spider-Man, Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and the Hulk. It's also a lot of fun to become familiar with deeper cuts that I wasn't aware of, like Jeff the Land Shark and Moon Knight.

The thing is, these heroes are more than just visual design. They come with abilities and movesets of their own that inform gameplay, and Rivals leans heavily into that. In my eyes, Gundam Evolution failed because it was a shooter first and a Gundam game second--it was easy to forget that you're supposed to be embodying these big hulking mechs. In contrast, Marvel Rivals is more than happy to break the rules of the shooting genre in order to fulfill the Marvel fantasy. Spider-Man and Venom feel like they're ripped right out of another Spider-Man video game. Other brawly characters like Iron Fist and the Hulk don't necessarily fit neatly into the shooter paradigm. This penchant for throwing the rulebook out the window may break the game's balance at times, but it sure is a hell of a lot of fun, and contrasts favorably to Overwatch's sterile ultra-balanced approach. I get that people want things to be as fair as possible with their player vs. player games, but I personally favor the pure chaotic fun of Rivals instead.

It is impossible to deny, however, that Marvel Rivals is incredibly derivative. It copies many design elements from Overwatch; It lifts macro components such as the 6v6 competitive format, the segregation of heroes into 3 distinct roles and the basic escort/domination game modes. It also copies character gameplay elements in order to fill out its sizable launch roster, with Tracer, Reinhardt, Soldier: 76, Widowmaker and Mei being represented in characters like Star-Lord, Doctor Strange, the Punisher, Black Widow and Groot, respectively.

The developers at NetEase are walking a dangerous tightrope here. They want to lure dissatisfied Overwatch players by offering a comparable experience using a stellar roster of playable characters. But at the same time, to be reminded of Overwatch while playing Marvel Rivals is to also be reminded of just how much more polished and feature-packed that game is. It's not fair of course--Overwatch has had 8 years of continuous updates that have introduced heaps of new characters and game modes--but it's nonetheless a risky thing to do.

I've only spent 25 hours with the game, so it may be too early to tell, but so far it feels like they have successfully toed that line. The Marvel factor lets Rivals sufficiently differentiate itself from Overwatch, and has so far kept me more than happy while on the competitive grind. Time will tell if NetEase can provide the level of support the game would need to have true staying power, but as it stands this is the most fun I've had with a new competitive shooter in years.

TL;DR: The core game is really fun and polished, but there are some issues that make the experience unenjoyable. The issues I have with this game are: the lack of role queue and being so dependent on a good team comp, the performance issues, the devs not letting us to change the .ini files again to improve our performance on PC, and forced mouse acceleration really hinders the experience for me.

Positives:

All heroes unlocked

Permanent Battle Pass

Graphics are really charming and the style and UI are really good.

Only a skin shop. No P2W at all.

Really fun hero designs.

When team-comps are right.........the game is really fun. Really really fun.

Fair ranking system.

Mixed:

I love the kit on all the heroes to be fair, although some heroes are really weak. Storm has such an interesting kit to bad she's garbage.

The unbalanced heroes can be a good thing and a bad thing. I like a lot of the OP ultimates and I really hope they dont get nerfed, but some heroes reallllyyyy need some buffs.

Negatives: Don't get me wrong... I love this game, but the dev director is already making pretty bad mistakes for not listening to it's playerbase on the game's most glaring issue: open queue and the dependence of viable team comps.

The fact that you are so dependable on having a good comp. I wouldn't mind having only open queues if the teamcomp wouldn't have such an impact on your fun. It really isn't fun to just be on a 6 dps team to see yourself get instakilled by a team that has a decent comp, or to solo heal......ugh solo healing suckkkkssssssss in this game.

The open queue should be optional, along with role queue. Even in OW role queue isn't bad at all. I always find games relatively quick.

Also the performance can be improved a lot on PC. Also NetEase please let us change the .ini files again if you do not plan on improving the performance...