August is a big month for Marvel games with the release of Marvel’s Avengers next major update, War for Wakanda, which will introduce Black Panther to the game and ferry players to Wakanda to battle Ulysses Klaue. August 25th also just happens to be the release date of another Marvel game that MMO players have been looking forward to, Marvel Future Revolution. In this tale of two online Marvel games, who will win when the dust settles?
As Marvel Heroes Omega/Online nears its 5-year shutdown anniversary, it’s clear that fans, such as myself, are still trying to find a solid replacement after all these years. In September of 2020, Square Enix released Marvel’s Avengers, and it attempted to become that home, but fell short of meeting expectations. All hope had not been lost, however, as Marvel Future Revolution, a mobile ARPG title by Netmarble with many similarities to Marvel Heroes, was just on the horizon. Whether it’s the Inhumans vs the X-Men, or Cap vs Iron Man in Civil War, putting Marvel against Marvel is nothing new. Now, with the intimate knowledge of both games seared into my brain after hundreds of hours of play, it’s time to pass along what I’ve learned in a trial by fire. In this cage match of Marvel titles, who will win? Flame on!
Story
Marvel’s Avengers: In Marvel’s Avengers, players start their journey as Kamala Khan, who will come to be known as Ms. Marvel (not to be confused with the Carol Danvers, Captain Marvel character). The story in Marvel’s Avengers is by far my favorite part of the game. Each mission feels unique, there aren’t unnecessary quests, and you meet, not just main characters, but cameos from other parts of the Marvel Universe, organically. The free DLC that introduces Kate Bishop and Clint Barton, also known as the Hawkeyes, fulfills Crystal Dynamic’s promise to provide exceptional story content, and I don’t doubt for a moment that War for Wakanda will deliver an exceptional storyline as well.
Marvel Future Revolution: Marvel Future Revolution all comes down to one word. Convergence. The Convergence is blending all of the realities into one, effectively destroying the multiverse as we know it, but with the help of Vision, the worlds have merged, but stabilized. You start the game as whatever chosen character you desire, and are welcomed into the world of Marvel Future Revolution with a unique, customized experience tailored to that character. Each character has their own starting story, complete with iconic villains like Magneto, or dimensional abnormalities like Evil Daredevil. Once you’re through the initial experience, you’re met with dozens of mundane side quests and a main story that is interesting and has some great voice acting at times, but is prolonged by squad ranke leveling gaps that pull you out of a cohesive story experience.
Winner: Marvel’s Avengers
Gameplay
Marvel’s Avengers: The visceral combat of Marvel’s Avengers promotes the feeling that you’re actually one with the character. To this day, I enthusiastically disagree with the way some of the abilities work, and find the lack of available skill varieties for each character disappointing, but it’s still hard for me to deny that Crystal Dynamics came out with a heroic-feeling combat system. Playing Captain America as a ranged character, and feeling that impact of his shield ricocheting through enemies, is almost as satisfying as going full Ronin with Clint Barton’s sword in close range, eviscerating scores of robots. You can attack, dodge, block and counterattack in ways that require fast reflexes, but when done right, crescendo into a gratifying defeat of your enemies.
Marvel Future Revolution: Mobile Action RPG’s aren’t exactly known for their complex combat systems. Most of them, MFR included, make use of an auto-play feature that permits the game to be far more accessible to a wider assortment of player. Combat, luckily, has some complexity to it. Players will need to unlock skills and choose variants of their preferred abilities if they hope to be successful. All characters have access to a dodge skill, which will need to be used properly if they ever hope to surpass the, often punishing, bosses. Netmarble makes dodging deadly abilities easy. The dodge button will turn gold when you need to push it, but despite having that knowledge, some bosses may still prove too challenging until you learn the pattern. In the end, there will be numerous encounters that you can’t use “auto-play” on, until you’ve gained an appropriate power level, but once you do, there really isn’t much that requires “hands-on” play.
Winner: Marvel’s Avengers
Multiplayer
Marvel’s Avengers: From the jump, MA seemed to have problems with matchmaking. Most of those issues have since been resolved, except for one major, glaring issue. There really wasn’t a reason to team up with other players on launch, or even several months after launch. A raid-like operation called the Cloning Lab was meant to be a big part of endgame, but never materialized. Instead, multiplayer missions related to Tachyon Anomalies, Villain Sectors, and the recently released Multiplayer Mega Hives have now taken center stage as the major multiplayer driven events in the game. More of these features are on the way, including a Patrol Mode, which is slated to be a large open zone where you can meet and play with other players, but there is no ETA on when that will be available.
Marvel Future Revolution: Marvel Future Revolution doesn’t just feel like a multiplayer game, it has a Massively Multiplayer feel to it. From the moment you load into Omega Flight Headquarters, to your first world-boss battle, other players fill your screen, call out for assistance in chat, and send team invites as you quest throughout the various worlds. With the exception of the instanced story-bosses and the Battle Challenge operation mode, everything else is geared towards playing with other people. No, it’s not necessary to team up in all situations. I can solo Blitz missions and Raids, and prefer to do so on some occasions, but the underlying premise for all of these game modes is to play with other people. It’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. PvP is a complete joke, with horrible matchmaking and little to no strategy to win against high-powered, paying players. There is also an alliance feature which is key to earning certain rewards to become more powerful. You even get rewarded just for adding players to your friends list by sending them tokens every day. When it comes to multiplayer, MFR proves it’s clobberin’ time and knocks it out of the park.
Winner: Marvel Future Revolution
Customization
Marvel’s Avengers: Throughout the entirety of the Marvel Universe, there are some fantastic costumes to choose from, but it still strikes me as odd how few of them there are in Marvel’s Avengers. The vast majority of costumes in the game are just variant colors of the same costume, or modest changes from one look to the next. Each costume comes as a complete set, and there is no mixing and matching of any features, so if there’s something you like from one costume, but would love to see it on one of the others, that really isn’t in the cards. Whether you’ve selected the Big Green Hulk Outfit, which is more of a traditional comic look, or the Iconic outfit which is a more realistically colored take, they look nearly identical apart from a color palette shift. There are definitely some standout options to customize your look, and you can add emotes to flesh out a personality of sorts, but you’re very limited. The limitations permeate into your character builds as well. Eventually, you’ll unlock everything available to a character, with some modest options in the skill trees to differentiate your build from someone else. Unfortunately, you can’t choose any alternate abilities, just minor differences in functionality of the abilities you already have, which severely limits the ability to theory craft new ways to play.
Marvel Future Revolution: MFR isn’t officially out yet, but based on the soft-launch costume selection, and the way in which players choose the look of their character, you can consider it the visual old-west out there. If you really like a particular haircut, helmet or mask, you can wear it. If that helmet doesn’t match with the rest of your gear, that’s completely up to you. There are 15 costumes available in the soft-launch, each with multiple variants available for you to collect. Those 15 costumes can create thousands of different combinations so that you can truly make a unique character, in ways that just aren’t available in Marvel’s Avengers. Each character also has more than 3 abilities to choose from. Each character has 8 customizable abilities, with 4 variants for each skill. This leads the way for players to theorycraft builds, with unconventional and sometimes surprising outcomes.
Winner: Marvel Future Revolution
Monetization
Marvel’s Avengers: Cosmetics, Cosmetics and more Cosmetics. When it comes to monetization, you can’t really go wrong with the way that Crystal Dynamics went with their marketplace, unless of course, you’re Square Enix. Players can buy access to challenge cards for newly released characters, and earn special currency, outfits, nameplates and emotes just from completing them. There are special finishers and costumes that you can only get in the marketplace, but there is no DLC for purchase, everything apart from what is in the marketplace or on the challenge card is earnable in game. The lack of monetization is excellent for consumers, but not quite so good for Square Enix’s bottom line, despite seeing some modest growth in microtransactions since launch.
Marvel Future Revolution: What can you say about the monetization of a mobile game? Netmarble has monetization down to a science, and that science is geared towards milking players for as much money as they are willing to spend. Players can buy Costumes, which give power bonuses, Cards, that also give combat power bonuses -- Potentials, Squad Rank Books, Cores, all of which give combat power bonuses. In soft-launch it’s apparent that their backend metrics are geared towards finding the right balance between making the game accessible to everyone, but punishing enough in certain aspects to push players to spend if they want to progress more quickly. In no way do players *have* to spend money, but some of the systems are so punishing, if you don’t spend, it could take you months to obtain your goal. Regional costumes are a good example of this. Crafting regional costumes is exceptionally rare and based on RNG, and the cost to craft is gated by the amount of syn particles you earn per day. Recently they’ve increased that number, making it so punishing, you may only craft a couple pieces of gear a day. This kind of RNG must come straight out of the Darkhold itself, it’s nearly pure, unfiltered chaos magic!
Winner: Marvel’s Avengers
Itemization and Progression
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Marvel’s Avengers: I won’t mince words here, gear in MA is abysmal. This isn’t really new information; Crystal Dynamics is aware that people aren’t entirely thrilled with the available gear in the game. Most of the gear dives head first into status effects, and the most sought after revolve around buffs that usually proc on hit or critical hit, boosting intrinsic ability gain or damage. The itemization doesn’t fundamentally change anything about your chosen character, in the same way that every character that reaches max level is effectively the same. Unlocking all your skills doesn’t dramatically change how you play, nor does the gear that you slot. You can grind out your favorite set of exotic gear, if you so choose, but eventually, you either get what you want to max level, or you stop trying to get that perfect roll because it’s just not enticing enough to keep looking for it. There really isn’t something special waiting for you at the end of this rainbow.
Marvel Future Revolution: Itemization in MFR isn’t necessarily exciting, but it is a journey. Every character that you level up, will eventually reach the 100-level maximum, but that is only the beginning of your arduous trek to a 900,000 and up combat power character. To put this in perspective, I finished my first play through on Dr. Strange, at level 100, and 230K combat power. Itemization is shaped around Cards, Costumes, Badges and Cores, many of which have set bonuses, stats you can roll for, and upgrades you can perform. In addition to the gear you slot, progression also requires that you level up multiple characters, if you want to increase your Squad Rank quickly. Potential and Specialization upgrade components will also need to be earned through daily quests so that you continue growing stronger. Every facet of Marvel Future Revolution’s content builds an itemization-pyramid with the means to make your characters stronger.
Winner: Marvel Future Revolution
Tie Breaker
There is nothing stopping you from playing both games, and I know that, in the end, I’ll be doing just that. Marvel’s Avengers is heading into its first anniversary within the next couple months. This first year has been a roller-coaster of sorts. We were told that new characters would be headed into the game faster than we expected. We were told to expect meaningful end game multiplayer. The pandemic has delayed a lot of what we expected to see. On the horizon, there’s a PlayStation Exclusive playable Spider-Man that has rubbed a lot of players the wrong way. We may never see gear become meaningful in the ways we expect, and updates are still rolling out more slowly than players would like.
Netmarble, on the other hand, is known for pushing out updates and content at a sometimes-dizzying pace. They pretty much have to. In Marvel Future Fight a new update rolled out every month, with ongoing weekly and monthly events specifically built to keep players invested. To that end, it’s just easier to fall into step with the notion that Marvel Future Revolution is a game that will keep both casual and hardcore players entertained for as long as they’re willing to put in the work to make their characters stronger. I know that I’ll be there for the launch of War for Wakanda. I have no misconceptions about how much I’ll geek out when playing Black Panther as I stalk through Wakanda. Then, once the story is over, I’ll be right back in the thick of the combat power grind in Marvel Future Revolution.
Winner: Marvel Future Revolution
