Co-Op Campaign
Ways Marvel’s Avengers Could Have Been Better
When you first boot up Marvel’s Avengers, it informs you that the Avengers Initiative (the multiplayer) section of the game contains spoilers for the campaign, and so advises you play through that first.
Under normal circumstances this’d be fine, because it turns out that the campaign is pretty great. The writing’s solid — albeit a little cliché — and makes playing through the various missions far more enjoyable as a result.
The problem is, the campaign lasts for about 10-15 hours and is entirely single-player. Given the game has been pushed as a grindy mutiplayer experience, recommending players take on 12 hours of gameplay on their own before jumping into what you’d be forgiven for thinking was a co-op experience is just odd.
By the time I’d wrapped up the campaign, I was fatigued with Marvel’s Avengers monotonous gameplay (I’ll dive into this shortly) and didn’t even really want to play with friends.
Had the developers enabled players to slowly but surely have more and more players join them in their campaign as they grew their roster of Avengers, I think a lot more of the ‘team synergy’ and bad-ass combos you can pull off with other heroes would have come to the forefront of the experience for a lot of players.
Alas, for now, you’re destined to plod through Kamala Khan’s adventure on your lonesome, with nobody but the slightly stupid AI companions to help you out.
More Endgame Content at Launch
Ways Marvel’s Avengers Could Have Been Better
A pretty self-explanatory entry here, but once you wrap up the campaign and are thrown into Marvel’s Avengers’ endgame grind, you’ll find yourself more or less doing the exact same things you’ve just been doing for the past 10-15 hours.
Unlike Destiny which had exciting exotic quests, a PvP area, Raids, and more for players to try their hand at, there’s none of that in Avengers. You’ll carry on taking on HARM Room Challenges, War Zone, and Drop Zone missions, leveling up your hero as you go.
Of course, this is a live game, so Crystal Dynamics has plenty of plans to bring more content on a regular basis to the game via post-launch updates, but even so, there should have been a little more meat on the bone at release date to keep players coming back before that first all-important content drop.
More Varied Environments
Ways Marvel’s Avengers Could Have Been Better
One thing that got really old really fast was the lack of varied environments in Marvel’s Avengers. Simply put, it reuses the same five or six different environments for all of its missions, seldom changing where you go within them from mission to mission.
What you’re left with is a tiresome and even more repetitive-feeling experience where you’re smashing the same robotic enemies in the same tired-looking locations.
I’d probably be a little more forgiving if these environments were absolutely stunning or had a bunch of cool surprises tucked away… but they don’t. Again, chances are Crystal Dynamics could release a new environment as part of the post-launch content updates, but the damage has already been done for the current roster.
Better Performance
Ways Marvel’s Avengers Could Have Been Better
Marvel’s Avengers isn’t some visually stunning game that you’re going to be staring at, jaw on the floor style. In fact, it looks kinda average. As such, you’d expect that the game would run pretty well, especially on the stop-gap systems like the PS4 Pro and Xbox Series X which offer more horsepower than their standard counterparts. That’s not the case.
While playing through the campaign on a PS4 Pro, I had massive framerate drops, screen tearing, subtitles that didn’t match up with the dialog, crashes to the home screen, and bugs that made certain characters entirely invisible. Oh, and don’t forget the stupidly long load times.
Marvel’s Avengers feels severely underbaked when it comes to the performance side of things and only goes to add to the frustrations when you’re actually playing the game.
Nobody wants to look at Hulk’s ugly mug for a minute on a loading screen, thanks!
Refined Combat
Ways Marvel’s Avengers Could Have Been Better
Arguably Marvel’s Avengers’ biggest downfall is its monotonous-feeling combat. During our 20-odd hours with the game, there were seldom times where combat felt satisfying. The rest of the time, button-mashing seemed to do the trick, especially given the parry and vault moves don’t always actually work when you press them.
On top of that, some of the superheroes’ abilities just aren’t that exciting to use. Black Widow, for example feels somewhat lackluster overall in combat, but her invisibility and charged weapon shot are so whatever compared to the likes of Thor’s BiFrost or Iron Man’s Unibeam or Hulkbuster.
What you’re left with is combat that feels uneven among its roster. For a multiplayer-focused experience, that’s a problem. Nobody wants to play as one of the naff characters when all their friends are pulling off bad-ass abilities and working together to pull off deadly combos.
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