What I Didn’t (and Did) Like about Marvel’s Avenger War Table
While I, like many others have been very cautiously optimistic about the Crystal Dynamic Avengers game. I regret to say that the War Table video struck down most of my interest in the game.
The Avengers game seems keen to follow in the steps of games Like Destiny with Gear, Vendors and co-op/single player activities. Yet, it looks as if it already has one foot out the door of the online should they need to pivot to a full single player experience.
Them already having that one foot out the door is not the part that bothers me. I’d rather have the entire game be a single player experience. Single player is the way I will play the game should I decide to give it a shot.
The part that bothered me the most during the gameplay trailer was the generic locations and the typical generic enemies found in “looter shooter” style games. The game does not seem to be very polished and the systems seem boring.
The entire time I was watching the combat it seemed to lack a fluidity that I feel most game players desire in their superhero games. While I admit it can be challenging to judge controls without playing the game, I feel that I have seen enough gameplay demos in my life to say that I am pretty cautious about the game in terms of combat.
Moving on to the cosmetics, while I was very glad to see that there were cosmetics to open through gameplay. I was immediately let down when they mentioned that there will be more content to purchase from the marketplace. I was hoping that they were making a gaming experience that did not require the consumer to pay for classic hero costumes with real money.
Now onto what I did like about what was shown, The portion of Avengers War Table that I liked the most was seeing that the story would focus on MODOK. I think that this could be a very interesting and unique story. I am very glad to see that they did not go with Thanos since his story has been told so well within the movies. I think that an argument could be made that using a character like Ultron may have been interesting. I think there would have been additional stories to tell and ways to develop Ultron as a character that the movie did not have the time to do. Yet, MODOK will be a great Villain for this story and with his intelligence a great foe for the Avengers.
I also was a big fan of the traversal in the gameplay. I liked seeing the flying characters like Iron Man and Thor move around the air, I also enjoyed seeing hulk jump from rooftop to ground level. I hope traversal feels as fun to play as it looked in this gameplay trailer. I even think that some of the flying combat looked slightly more realised than the on foot combat.
While it is impossible to know exactly what the gameplay will be like until the beta launches in the next few months and the game launches in September, we will have to speculate. I hope that Marvel’s Avengers proves me wrong and is a fun, fully realized Avengers experience. Until I. hear more though, I’m afraid I am not confident in this game being the Avengers game I wanted. There have been so many great superhero games in the last decade like the Arkham Series and Marvel’s Spider-man. I worry that Marvel’s Avengers doesn’t look to be of that same quality.