Avengers Assemble! This is a game that for me felt like it took forever to come out. When I heard that Crystal Dynamics was making a game based on The Avengers, I was very excited. I well and truly put the beta through its paces, but the full release turned out even better than I thought it would be.
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The Game Review
The biggest draw for me about this game is the story. While the game is called, The Avengers, more than anything it is an origin story for Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan. She is a fantastic character and the opening scene when you see her as a child really puts you in her shoes.
There is a terrible event called, A-Day, where The Avengers were blamed for a lot of collateral damage and they have disbanded. I do not want to go into spoilers here, but young Kamala sets out to bring the gang back together all the while learning about her own powers and what it is to become a hero.
As fantastic as the origin story of Ms. Marvel is, The Avengers also has another one. M.O.D.O.K is one of the best villains in a video game is quite some time. What I love about his portrayal here is that we get an origin story for him too. There are other classic bad guys, but seeing him get to take center stage was really cool.
You get to play as Ms. Marvel, Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, Black Widow, and Captain America. Each character has their own playstyle, story, and upgrade tree for you to experience. I love how different each character feels. My personal favorite is Ms. Marvel, but Thor is a very close second.
The gameplay is a bit of a button masher, but I like that. Ms. Marvel’s stages have an emphasis on platforming, Hulks on hand to hand combat, and Iron Man gets to fly around. So, there is quite a bit of variety to the play style. I played the game on a standard PS4 and the frame rate on occasion would get pretty bad, but I am not sure if that is the case on a PS4 Pro or an Xbox One X.
Some people find this kind of gameplay rather boring, but I like it. The fighting feels very satisfying and the platforming has a lot in common with the Crystal Dynamics Tomb Raider games. You have a lot of missions that you can do, there are main story missions, side missions and you can even do team missions online or with the AI. The AI in these missions can be frustratingly stupid though!
The only thing I am not a big fan of is one of the main features of the game and that is the loot system. Getting new costumes is awesome and I am all in. However, finding all these little bits of loot that give you plus one for this or plus one for that does nothing for me at all. I get that the idea is you are supposed to play the same missions over and over again, but that is not for me. I played the story, loved it and I am happy to wait until the new characters.
For me, Square-Enix has to release characters at a regular rate. I know that some will love the loot aspect and the slow progression system. For me, I want more story. We know that we have Hawkeye coming and PlayStation owners also get to play as Spider-Man, but I hope they are going to also give new story missions for the current cast too.
I have to say that Avengers turned out way better than I thought it would be. While the intention may be that you keep playing this over and over. I am more than happy with playing through the story once or twice and then jumping back in when a new character or content is released.
