Marvel Rivals had a bit of an uphill battle, joining the gaming community at a time where live-service titles flop far more often than succeed, all in the middle of an oversaturated market, one that saw an especially high-profile failure not too long ago in the form of Sony’s disastrous Concord cancellation. What’s so shocking about Marvel Rivals is just how enjoyable it is, proving itself to be one of the most fun Overwatch alternatives on the market with far more than enough content to last a long while.
Table of Contents
A Stacked Roster
One of the strongest aspects of Marvel Rivals is its surprisingly massive roster, made even better by the fact that every single character now and in the future are free. All 33 launch characters are playable from the start, and there’s no tedious grind to unlock a character like you’d find in other operator based multiplayer titles.
Each character feels like they’ve been given the proper time of day with regards to their skillset, and not a single one feels like a clone of another. Sure, some have similar properties, but having at least tried out each and every single one, all 33 feel very distinct and unique with regards to their playstyles, and there’s a little something for everyone.
Snipers will find themselves comfortable in Black Widow’s shoes, ironically taking the form of Overwatch’s Widowmaker with her own sniper abilities, and even then, she has a melee attack option in case enemies get a little too close for comfort. Regular shooter players might find themselves drawn to the Punisher’s arsenal of heavy weapons, with a strong assault rifle and solid shotgun mixed with a turret for an ability and a pair of gatling guns for an ultimate.
While the roster is undeniably stacked, with most of the heroes you’d expect from a 6v6 Marvel game appearing right out of the gate, there are only a few undeniable villains, with Venom, Hela, Loki and Magneto being the main ones while others like the Winter Soldier and aforementioned Punisher fall comfortably into complicated anti-hero roles. Since the game looks like it’ll be supported for a long while, hopefully more villainous characters like Kraven and Green Goblin could make an eventual appearance.
Every character available has their own dedicated lore page alongside their abilities list, and each text exploring the characters is small, but very helpful for anyone wanting to know either about a character they haven’t encountered yet, or for anyone wanting to know about this game’s variant. For anyone wondering just who Squirrel Girl and Luna Snow are, being among the slightly less mainstream in the roster, there’s enough here to learn about them.
What truly makes the roster endearing is the interactions between everyone, with pre-fight interactions between teammates allowing for more of a look into their established relationships with each other and allowing for some fun moments. Their quips and chatter in the middle of matches certainly help give depth to Marvel Rivals’ iterations of these new and classic heroes.
Their costumes are all actually rather well-made, with distinct palettes helped by the game’s strong artstyle. They all have strong appearances, with connections to comics helping them remain unique from one another. Particularly, Wolverine in the game actually retains a comic-accurate short nature.
Replayable Maps, Assemble
There’s a few things available on launch, regular quick matches, a conquest mode, and competitive matches. Conquest serves as the game’s more casual, arcade-style mode, focused on quick team eliminations as opposed to team efforts to complete objectives, and is pretty fun for anyone looking for shorter games.
Quick matches have three modes, Domination, Convergence and Convoy, some of which will be instantly familiar to anyone who has even so much as touched a game in the same genre. These exact game modes are also playable in the game’s competitive mode but with a few slight changes.
While they are familiar, they remain just as fun as ever with how Marvel Rivals’ combat goes. Domination features two teams clashing with each other for control of a point, and have to make sure they hold it even once it hits 99%, keeping the enemy team from stealing it at overtime, something that makes sure that there’s still a fighting chance even for a team who hasn’t gotten close to 99%.
Convoy just involves making sure a slow moving vehicle manages to make it across the map to its final destination, and it is nice that there are in-game reasons for each convoy. This is something that will be incredibly familiar to Overwatch players, and its reappearance here does help newcomers adjust.
Convergence is relatively simple, in that it just combines the two game modes by having an attacking team try to claim a point before proceeding to accompany it and defend it along its path against the defending team. All three modes are very simple and while there aren’t a lot, they’re all very much fun enough to be replayable.
Every single location is distinct, and not a single one is really that forgettable, from the Hydra bases to the Yggdrasil map. They all feel like appropriate places, and with a solid amount of verticality on each level, there’s something for every type of character available, with even those taking place indoors having space for flying characters. There’s a few things here and there like to help regain health or bring your character to another level, but the map interaction is rather minimal even with the destructible environments.
Balancing and Performance
One of the game’s few problems is its occasionally unbalanced characters. Trying to deal with incredibly powerful characters like Hela and healers that regain health incredibly consistently while using one of the game’s more underpowered characters can be quite frustrating.
The game’s balancing early on feels a bit weird, as there are some characters who are great to use like the aforementioned Hela, having great damage and great evasion tools. The characters are all useful in their own ways, but some are clearly far more powerful than others, as resulted by how often one would see them in matches.
That said, every character in the game is viable to at least some degree, thanks in large part to not only the strength of some of their ultimate abilities (Jeff the Land Shark’s being both funny and frustrating). These ultimate abilities certainly are able to change the tide of the battle, but feel a bit too powerful in some cases when they instantly regenerate all of one’s lost health, not counting the bonus health added.
What helps the game stand out mechanically is its strong, combination based abilities. Every character has at least one other person on the roster that they can combine abilities with, sometimes resulting in passive buffs, and others outright giving brand new, powerful abilities. One of these abilities is given to Black Widow, who, when on the same team as Hawkeye, can shoot the afterimages of enemies to deal big damage with her sniper rifle.
All of these team abilities help provide Marvel Rivals with the depth it needs to remain both competitive and replayable, as experimenting with characters and coordinating with your team is great for making sure you’re playing each match as best as you can.
Thanks to the game’s nice artstyle, it runs extremely well on a base PS5 system, with a standard 60fps mode, as well as an additional 120fps mode for those that are able to utilize one. Having spent quite a lot of time with the 120fps mode, I’m able to say that the game performs exceptionally well on consoles. It does also come with a desertion penalty for those who leave in the middle of matches too much, though this does unfortunately happen to those like myself whose game crashed.
Verdict
Marvel Rivals is a big new entry into an overcrowded, very cutthroat genre, but it makes a very solid case for itself as one of its best new entries. With a fantastic cast, strong gameplay and a lot of variety as to its characters, this new hero-focused title is one of 2024’s most addictive games, with its large, free and recognizable roster helping its case massively.
