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After spending these few days with the Marvel Rivals playtest, the similarities between it and Blizzard's hero shooter Overwatch 2 extend far beyond aesthetics to familiar UI elements and game mechanics.
The third-person perspective, though, had held promise for something different—a title that will draw the line between embracing the Marvel Universe while not completely imitating the gameplay from Overwatch games.
All in all, Marvel Rivals is pretty familiar but enjoyable. Taking characters we know and love and pitting them against a tested formula is a win-win. While it doesn't hold anything particularly groundbreaking, it's shaping up to be a resilient addition to the hero-shooter genre.
Gameplay and characters
In Marvel Rivals, you can play for huge heroes and bad guys like Spider-Man, the Hulk, Venom, the Punisher, Iron Man and others. Each of them has their own unique abilities that make it very nice when trying to find your main guy. During my time with the game, I played a series of matches as Spider-Man, Iron Man, Venom, and the Punisher, all of them offering a ton of fun.
The modes themselves, though, are pretty standard across most shooter games—a payload escort and some point captures. All very familiar, all very reliable, but hardly anything new, really. What's most impressive, though, is how, through it all, the game runs smoothly and looks amazing—really fantastic for how far out we are from an official release.
It offers 20 heroes and villains, each having different roles: Tank, DPS, and Support. There is a star ranking system listing the hardness of characters, which really comes in handy as there isn't a full tutorial available at the moment. So players will have to learn their way around, which looks pretty intimidating and requires a lot of time.
I played as the Punisher, and his turret, smoke bomb, and throwing hook as and escape ability made me feel like this is the strongest hero in the game. The animations are pretty neat, and so are the character designs. The Punisher was pretty easy to use and probably the most overpowered hero in the game. Still, despite how simplistic he was, I really started to enjoy playing his easy style and came away with a few wins.
I have also played Spider-Man, Iron Man, and Venom, all of whom make the game feel fresh and different to play based on their unique abilities. All in all, the web-based attacks of Spiderman and Venom really bring out the dynamic feeling of swinging around the map.
His mechanics prove actually hard to master and require some practice. I had big expectations from Iron Man, but after trying him, I kind of felt disappointed. He isn't dealing that much damage, and he feels pretty slow—definitely a hero who should get buffs.
Inspired by Overwatch
Marvel Rivals proudly wears its Overwatch inspiration on both sleeves. Such capabilities of Marvel characters often feel like direct analogues to those in Overwatch, boiling them down into functional roles rather than unique heroes; characters become outlines amidst the mess of chaos and abilities flying around in fights.
Some characters, like Iron Man and Spider-Man, break this mould. The flying of Iron Man is rather unique to play, even if a bit slow-moving. Spider-Man is incredibly mobile but does not seem to have had his development folded into the game environment, his gameplay feeling quite awkward.
Comic book Marvel, not the movie one
Each time I think of Marvel, my first association is always the Marvel movies: Cris Hemsworth, Robert Downey Jr., Scarlet Johansson, and other Hollywood creme de la creme who generously lend their respective faces and voices to make all those iconic heroes come to life in our eyes.
But Marvel Heroes isn't made with them as role models. Instead, this game kept the original comic book design, and I must say it was a total hit. The characters and the arenas you fight in are so well portrayed that you'll enjoy every match, if for nothing more than their great and unique designs.
Marvel Heroes's visuals are very attractive, colourful, and look like a high-quality cartoon, with graphical effects identical to the ones shown in cartoons or comic books.
The game is made using cel-shading technology, and in this manner, it seems Overwatch was the inspiration as well, where cartoonish characters give the impression of a less serious game that is suitable for grownups and kids alike.
All in all, Marvel Heroes looks fantastic, with all those vivid colours and greatly designed characters, but the star of the show, when it comes to the graphical presentation, is, without doubt, the great reflection effects. All arenas feature a lot of reflectable surfaces, and the designers made those reflections look very nice and very realistic. The effects are not ray-traced; it is obvious, but I must admit they look very close to it.
Even though the game is very good-looking and features a lot of modern graphical effects, its performance is very good, almost without problems at all. There are occasional FPS drops, especially when it is crowded on the screen, but nothing that can be considered a game-breaker, so to speak.
My mid-range PC with an RTX 3060 GPU handled the game on max settings with FPS way above 60 all the time and only with occasional drops. Hence, performance-wise, Marvel Heroes is more than okay—at least the PC version, which I and my colleague had the opportunity to try out.
Final thoughts
Marvel Rivals can definitely find its place in the modern hero-shooter genre. While strongly inspired by the formula of Overwatch, with a dash of assistance from some really loved Marvel characters, it does bring a fairly distinct spin to the proceedings. The game seems polished, with good graphics and smooth performance, which is good for an overall solid experience at launch.
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