GordonJAGReview Marvel Rivals Review

Yeah, let’s get it out of the way now: there’s no real way to talk about Marvel Rivals without also talking about Overwatch. I know people are down on the latter now, but let’s not pretend that Overwatch wasn’t genuinely beloved for a time, and arguably revolutionary for PvP shooter video games given how many games have clearly used it for inspiration, including the one being reviewed here. Avoiding comparisons between Rivals and Overwatch is like avoiding comparisons between Astro Bot and Super Mario Galaxy. It’s just not something that works all that well in practice. It’s also hard to ignore comparisons when Overwatch is a brightly colored game with highly stylized graphics, and because it certainly didn’t hurt the game on launch, a roster of attractive women in skintight outfits with nice butts. Rivals is also a brightly colored game with highly stylized graphics (though maybe not the best use of the Unreal Engine 5 in its current state) and a roster of attractive women in skintight outfits with nice butts. Granted, it is a hero shooter that is based on actual superheroes this time around, so maybe that last part is more of a requirement than an “artistic decision”. Either way, right out of the gate, there are a lot of similarities. Where Rivals differs from Overwatch, and this is one of the things I appreciate most about the game, is its seeming lack of care for how the game is balanced. Of course, NetEase does balance the game—it’s not a complete madhouse in there—but they do it in a way that sort of gives the impression they don’t care about game balance. In Overwatch, Blizzard was so focused on making sure everything felt insanely polished to exactly how they wanted it that things could feel rigid, and for the sake of their balancing, some characters didn’t feel good to play in their roles. Out of the 35 characters released in Rivals at the time of writing this, only a handful of them feel like they might lean toward the undertuned side. NetEase just does things with Rivals that Blizzard doesn’t really have the guts to do with Overwatch. One of the biggest examples I can think of is how Rivals has true flying characters like Iron Man and Storm. At the time of writing, Overwatch only has “flying” characters, if that makes sense. They have characters that are designed to work in the air, but they don’t have anyone who can fully and freely fly. Most of the mobile heroes are just mobile on the ground. That just seems like something Blizzard wouldn’t commit to doing with its game. The fundamental design philosophy differences between the two games might make Overwatch the more polished experience, but Rivals feels a bit scrappier (despite its massive IP), and more importantly, fun to play. One of the most important elements in a hero shooter is the character silhouettes, which is something Rivals, thankfully, manages to get right for the most part. The characters are all distinct with vibrant colors and designs that pop immediately, telling the player who they’re dealing with, friend or foe. The only exceptions to this at the time of writing are Dagger and Invisible Woman. Both of them are blonde white women with the same body type wearing primarily white catsuits with blue accents. The differences between the two don’t become more noticeable until you’re close to the character. What’s annoying is that this could have been solved by just making Invisible Woman’s costume recolor—one that’s primarily blue instead of white—her normal one. It’d be much easier to tell from a distance that it’s her. Despite how much fun I have with it, there are some gripes to be had with Rivals. There are some character design issues, like Iron Fist, a character who can shred most of the roster by hitting them with locked-on punches in melee combat, is also one of the best anti-air characters in the game. The game is also desperately calling out for some kind of minor counter to healing, even if it’s just a partial reduction. When someone like Luna Snow uses her Ultimate ability, your team gets to enjoy not playing the game for 12 seconds. And unless we’re judging characters based on the shapeliness of their butts and their cup sizes, Heroes like Black Widow feel pretty underwhelming, even when getting a lot out of her. They all add up to being some things in the game that have some interesting ideas, but even with NetEase’s approach to making things more wildly fun to play than polished to a shine, those things needed just a little more time in the oven before they were completely ready to be pushed out. That said, I’d rather you mess up a little trying to make a game more fun than mess up by trying to make the game more boring to appeal to as many people as humanly possible. However, it doesn’t stop at just some dodgy character design decisions. I’m not fully sold on the destructible and changing environments in the game. The destructible environments aren’t really too bad, and sometimes destroying a wall to create a line of sight or a bridge to take away an enemy’s high ground is cool. While those are neat features, I find myself getting more frustrated by the destroyed environment when it comes back. While it’s coming back, it acts as though it’s solid, so I’ve been killed because a sudden wall appeared between me and a health pack. The changing environments are a bit of a flop all around. The Mario Party map changes just don’t work well in gameplay. It’s nothing but frustrating when you’re playing as a character who places things down like Peni Parker, only to have some random shifting piece of geometry destroy your spider nest. I get the developers wanted to do something cool with the game, but this idea was a wash and doesn’t integrate naturally or smoothly into gameplay. One final pain point is not being able to disable crossplay for quick play on PC. You have over 400,000 players on Steam and I can count on one hand how many times my team was improved by getting matched with someone playing an Xbox or PS5. I’d still have fingers left over too. It’s just not acceptable not to have the option to disable crossplay with console players in anything but competitive, and it's not something PC players should have to deal with. Bringing it back to the positives, another thing that Rivals does well is its cosmetics. Most of the characters have at least one costume that looks cool, and since the game is a third-person shooter, you can actually see the costume you have. Overwatch does have some cool skins, but since it’s an FPS, you’re pretty much only seeing your skin when you’re dead, which does mean the skin loses a little something in its presentation. With a strong opening batch of cosmetics, and more fun heroes on the way, it has a good start with being able to monetize itself as a completely free-to-play game. Regardless of my gripes, I can’t deny it’s a fun game to play, and a lot of that is simply because of how busted it is. This is sort of what I expected a massive superhero shooter to feel like. A bunch of chaos and nonsense with very fast kill times sort of make it feel like Rivals is the fun party game version of a hero shooter. It does have some frustrations, but with a strong debut, Marvel Rivals has put itself in a good spot to take the crown that Overwatch dropped in the hero shooter department.