Speaking from a personal perspective, I love everything superhero. My parents just pulled into town for a week and brought some boxes of mine that I wasn’t able to transport when I first moved to Joburg and I’d say their contents were 90% comic books, collected since I was a wee pup. I live and breath everything superhero, so when it was announced that Square Enix, Crystal Dynamics and Eidos Montreal were uniting their powers (excuse the pun) to make a game based on The Avengers, I was shivering with excitement to see what it was all about. Now, after some gameplay and narrative trailers, I’m…well, I’m a little lost as to how I’m supposed to feel.
The recently unveiled trailers, shown off by Square Enix during an hour long showcase streamed last night, gave fans a little more information on what they can expect from the gameplay. The footage that highlights Thor crashing about looks fun but also…super bland. Like, you’re playing as the damn Avengers. Surely there’s something more interesting than generic robots to beat up? The combat looks to be a mix of a traditional action brawler games and the Batman: Arkham Trilogy, combining multi-button combos and precision button pressing and a largish arena to move around and beat things up. It’s cinematic and will probably be pretty fun in co-op, that I can’t deny, but nothing about it looks…interesting.
Then you get into the loot aspect of the game (because every game these days needs to have some kind of loot/gear based progression system) and things get a little more interesting. There seems to be a wide variety of different items for every playable characters to equip, some that just provide a basic power boost and others that have all out modifiers with wild effects. Equipping some Pym Particles to Iron Man’s repulsors to have them shrink opponents is just one such status effect and that’s kinda rad! You’ll also be able to unlock a whole load of unique costumes for every character, ripped from every adaption or storyline in Marvel’s 80 year history. You’ll unlock these by either playing the game or…paying real money. Blegh.
Lastly, the story looks just about as generic as one can get for an Avengers narrative. These are Earth’s Mightiest Heroes! We don’t need another story about how they’re actually not a great idea and do more harm than good; we’ve seen that story play out dozens of times across multiple mediums at this point. The reveal of MODOK being included in the game is cool, MODOK is an interesting villain, but it’s also the logical step when you announce AIM as your primary “Evil Corporation” of the game. Look, I don’t want to bash it too much, there’s still a lot of potential in the narrative. It just…it feels phoned in, especially the voice acting and minute-by-minute writing.
Look, there’s still a few months away from the game’s official release so maybe there’s time for the developers to shape things up a little tighter. It’s just that the gameplay that was shown last night was anything but comforting. May I be wrong and the final release of the game turns out to be cool as heck.
(Source: PC Gamer)