Take up the mantle, you’re an Avenger now. Marvel’s Avengers Beta Impressions

Marvel’s Avengers is probably quite highly anticipated by many a Marvel fan to say the least. The game is co-developed by Crystal Dynamics and Eidos-Montréal, with Bandai Namco Entertainment publishing it for the Southeast Asia region. Despite how it may look, the game is a narrative driven experience, and not following in the open world footsteps of many games out there.

OVERVIEW

You’ll spend a lot of time at the war table to make your next move, at least in the beta, alongside various characters from the Marvel universe:

• Steve Rogers / Captain America
• Tony Stark / Iron Man
• Bruce Banner / Hulk
• Thor (Odinson)
• Natasha Romanova / Black Widow
• Kamala Khan / Ms. Marvel
• Clint Barton / Hawkeye
• Spider-Man exclusively for PS4
• 3 more unknown characters at launch (not revealed yet)

Our early access into the beta revealed at least five regions, presumably more to come as the story expands. These future content and DLC will all be free too, so players can be assured they won’t be locked out of the developing story. The beta period will be reopening for those who pre-ordered the game on 7 August, so fans can count down the hours till they can experience this new Marvel universe for themselves.

The world is populated by some of the most recognizable names in the business – both for the Marvel characters themselves and the people who voice them – with Troy Baker as Bruce Banner, Travis Willingham as Thor, and Laura Bailey as Black Widow. Many of them reprise their roles from other animated works or games of the Marvel franchise, and it’s good to see them back.

The story is an original one, but does take a few key elements from the overall Marvel universe, one of them being the Terrigen Mist and the Inhumans (Ms Marvel being one of them). The public lose faith in the Avengers in the aftermath of the A-Day Incident, but our story only really begins five years after. In these five years, S.H.I.E.L.D. has also disbanded, and it falls to us to re-establish the Avengers, starting with finding its members while uncovering the incident behind A-Day and the release of Terrigen Mist on that fateful day.

Most of the story campaign was not available to play during the beta, so we’ll have to judge that when the game actually launches.

BUILDING BACK UP, BRICK BY BRICK

If you’ve seen our coverage on the War Table, you’d be aware that characters have levels. Each character will have their individual level, and only one character at a time. Level ups will grant skill points, and do not affect power levels. Power levels indicate the difficulty of missions. There will be varying challenge stages. In this case, there are four of them, namely:

• Challenge Level 1 (Easy) (Enemies – 5 power)
• Challenge Level 2 (Normal)
• Challenge Level 3 (Hard) (Enemies + 5 power)
• Challenge Level 4 (Very Hard) (Enemies + 10 power)

The skill points are pretty straightforward: allocate them as you wish in your character’s skill tree, which would typically unlock anything from new combos, enhance skill damage or effects and the like. Going by the beta, there will be four skill trees for everyone. Curiously, the open beta categorizes them as “Primary Skills”, hinting at presumably “secondary” or “tertiary” skills. The beta did not offer any indication about other skill categories, and since it’s the beta, we can probably assume they will be subject to changes. The skill descriptions are quite detailed, as attacks within combo chains tell you the amount of damage it does, its impact, stun chance and how enemies react when you hit them with it!

We also got the chance to have a proper look at the beta’s iteration of the Marketplace. There’s plenty of variety of goods to purchase according to rarity: Uncommon, Rare, Epic and Legendary, The shiny things in here are simply cosmetic, but considering the inclusion of photo mode within the game, it’s a good place to find the latest piece of bling to show off to others. With costumes, emotes and nameplates to start, this is your start to making your hero your own. We’d be looking forward to see what the most garish and clowny setup can be to strike fear into M.O.D.O.K. Maybe we can kill him with laughter, who knows?

Missions are technically dungeons, since they’re all instanced. You’ll find what missions you can do via the War Table in your helicarrier. Defeat conditions aren’t very complicated to begin with; solo play asks you not to die more than once. If you didn’t bring a companion, then your HP – called Willpower – depleting could see you restart the mission. There might be a limit to how many times you can go down in multiplayer, but we didn’t go out of our way to try that.

You can check missions before you hop in, primarily to see what drops you can get from it. Some of them can also have modifiers attached to make it a little harder, like spawning enemies with cyro attacks. Like it or not, there will be soft gates like these, asking you to farm up the appropriate gear providing resistance to make your life easier.

As you explore, there will be optional points of interest that will have loot chests, or have locked rooms. For the latter, there’ll be some puzzling to do, like finding and activating switches to open sesame. Other times, you might encounter stronger enemies that will drop better loot. The objectives will vary accordingly to give it that bit of variety, anything from securing an area to destroying a certain number of objects. It’s a little disconcerting that there is no minimap, which seems odd.

IT’S MIGHTY SMASHING TIME

Takedowns are some of the flashiest things you can execute in the game. It makes you invulnerable as you unleash the beat down, which you can take advantage of to avoid taking damage while dishing out a lot of your own onto the enemy. With a teammate, you even have combo takedowns which give off that “high-five good job team” superhero vibe. Turn those grunts or elites to a fine ground paste in style, though it will be harder if you happen to be undergeared. In that case, look out for environmental items that drop consumables to restore your Willpower, among other things, and get back into the fight.

Besides your skill tree, there are Heroics. You would have seen this in the War Table presentation as Thor calling upon the Bifrost. The beta doesn’t allow you to swap, or learn new ones, with everyone having one Heroic each. Whether or not there’ll be more Heroic types or skills, we’ll have to find out when the game launches. Heroics come with their own flavours as well:

• Ultimate (L1 + R1): These are typically damaging Heroics, but some can change a hero’s playstyle entirely like how Iron Man utilizes the Hulkbuster instead of his usual suit, in turn changing his combo chain
• Assault (R1): Damage
• Support (L1): Also deals damage, while either buffing yourself/your team, or landing debuffs on enemies

These Heroics are cooldown based, so it’s pretty much ultimate skills in your good ol’ MOBAs. In the chaos of fights, it can be hard to tell if takedowns reduce cooldowns of skills – if not necessarily Heroics – but there will be enemies that disable your skills.

For especially mobile characters, the motions are really fluid, as you seamlessly move from platform to platform – like with using Black Widow’s grappling hook – and land satisfying kicks into the enemy’s face. If you liked Batman: Arkham Knight’s combo fights, you’ll like it here too. In the case of Iron Man who can fly around freely, you’ll need some practice for aerial combat, but the transition from ground to air is not clunky at all if you do prefer to fisticuff on land.

NUMBERS, NUMBERS

There’s plenty of things to keep track of in this game. There are four different Ratings in Marvel’s Avengers, that are further broken down as follows:

In turn, there are also many variations of elemental damage, an incomplete list of which includes the following:

• Gamma 
• Cosmic
• Particle (shrinks enemies)
• Shock 
• Cryo (freezes enemies)
• Graviton

Gear grinding will be where you’d be spending a lot – and we mean, a lot – of time. The beta has 6 types of gear:

• Melee
• Ranged
• Defense
• Heroic
• Major artifacts
• Minor artifacts

The gear rarities were briefly mentioned in regards to the Marketplace, which are ranked from highest to lowest:

• Common
• Uncommon
• Rare
• Epic
• Legendary

Uncommon provides one gear perk, Rare two, Epic three, and without getting our own Legendary we can’t be sure, but we can reasonably assume it will give at least four gear perks. Commons do not have any. The rarities besides Common can be further upgraded with resources to unlock more gear perks, and are also limited according to their rarity. Uncommons can be boosted 3 times, Rares up to 5, and Epics at 10, with Legendary appropriately having more than Epic. Gear perks will be unlocked with the upgrades unless there aren’t any more perks to unlock. In the beta, the only way to increase your power level is to replace your gear as you go along.

The perks can range from anything to increasing your willpower (HP) for certain situations to adding elemental damage, or be combo-related, so you’d be changing up how you play your character depending on what perks you’ve stacked up. Pile on those light combo finishers and you’d focus on light combos, or pack on stun% perks to be the ultimate crowd control. If you’re not interested in a specific gear’s perks, you will be able to dismantle them to obtain resources, and accordingly, the dismantled gear will not be recoverable.

To encourage you to try out other characters, each of them will have daily and weekly quests. These quests will provide challenge points on completion, which will then result in obtaining emotes, skins, and nameplates depending on the hero challenge card. Additional resources are also obtainable this way. A Hero Challenge Card works similarly to a Battle Pass system in progression, if you want to know a closest comparison.

For the completionist, besides raising all your heroes, there are various in-game items you can find and pick up, namely:

• Comics
  • These provide tiny buffs, like 0.5% critical chance. Seems like learning more about yourself in universe is a good thing!
• Intelligence
  • Expository collectibles providing backstory for the game, with full voice work
• Codex
  • Enemy intel, obtainable after defeating enemies

TIME OUT AT THE HELICARRIER

Only four characters were available during the beta, namely, Iron Man, Black Widow, The Hulk, and Miss Marvel. They offer different playstyles as you might imagine, which we’ll describe in brief:

It’s especially fun when you can combo Heroics with your friends or others in multiplayer, asking that bit more coordination from everyone else to chain devastating attacks or buffing each other. Should you go down, your teammates, human or AI, will be able to get you back up. Since you can play with AI partners, you can play the game solo if you wish. They won’t be able to level up or obtain gear, but they’ll make your life that little bit easier. It’s probably more handy for players unused to playing these action games.

The developers have mentioned the presence of set gears, but they were not available in the beta that mostly only gives a taste of the early game. The set gears are geared – haha – towards end game content. We can at least see that characters will be unlocked as you progress through the story, so story progression isn’t just for any exclusive cosmetics. Considering the pride they’re taking in their story, this design philosophy is pretty expected.

The game isn’t the most hardcore title out there, but it’s not a walk in the park either. There’s plenty of other systems that exist in the game, like parrying, with appropriate equipment perks that reward you for your precision. Enemies can guard against your attacks, so you’ll have to break that with Heavy attacks or vault behind them to disable them. Even with your AI companions making things easier, but you still need to watch out, as you’re limited in how many times you can be revived.

From what we have so far, it’s a really fun game, with aspects for the truly hardcore who want to min max their stats. As the updates and DLC rolls in, we could have something really big on our hands. Look forward to it!

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