Marvel Heroes Review

Posted By Shaun K. about 1 week, 1 day ago

Marvel Heroes Review

I can trace my own secret origin as a comic book fan back to a fateful day when my family moved into a new home when I was age six. Up in the attic of our new abode there waited to be discovered several boxes filled with decade’s worth of Marvel comics from the 70′s and early 80′s. Such classic Marvel stories as The Dark Phoenix Saga, the first half of John Bryne’s original Fantastic Four run, the entirety of the original Marvel Two-In-One series featuring The Thing, and more were all included and I soon found myself well and truly hooked. Combine that with my love of action-RPGs and it should be easy to see why I was such a fan of Raven Software’s much beloved trilogy of Marvel titles consisting of X-Men Legends, X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse, and Marvel Ultimate Alliance. It also meant I have been curious as anything about Gazillion Entertainment’s long in development action-RPG MMO Marvel Heroes. But does this game reward true believers or does it deserve to be banished forevermore to The Negative Zone?

Marvel Heroes has been a long time coming, but sadly as it turns out it was not worth the wait. That is because Marvel Heroes is at best a by-the-numbers average Diablo clone that benefits so little from its license it is almost funny. Players pick a character (more on that shortly) and head out into one enemy-filled map after another where they beat up all comers while moving to the end of the map where a boss battle waits. Doing so gains them experience which in turn lets them level their character whereupon they can put points into a number of abilities from a variety of skill trees. They will also gain random loot that will offer stat boosts and other unique abilities while also gathering crafting materials to make other items. All of this should sound utterly familiar, since this is a game without an original bone in its body. Combined with its failings in other areas, this reliance on such a well-worn formula ultimately makes Marvel Heroes come across as a been-there-done-that experience more often than not.

The Avengers vs Thugs with Guns. In Marvel Heroes it is a less one-sided fight than you might think.

Theoretically, this is where the game’s Marvel Comics license should come in, but said license only serves to act as another of this game’s many failings. Too many disparate characters like Spider-Man, Hakweye, and Iron Man ultimately feel like they move and play the same or at least largely similar. Other odd choices include locking off movement powers like flight and web-swinging until level 10-ish and immersion-breaking number of duplicate characters running around at the same time. At the end of the day, this game does not make me feel like I am actually playing as a version of the characters in question. That is something Raven Software pulled off over a decade ago with X-Men Legends and repeated multiple times afterwards. Even the lesser Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 at least succeeded in that much. There are better Diablo clones out there and indeed there are even better free-to-play Diablo clones on the market at the moment. A title like Path of the Exiles has better overall gameplay, fresher ideas, greater ambition, and, oh yes, does not present players with an overpriced and exorbitant cash shop.

Not so incidentally, this cash shop may also just be this game’s single most damming feature when all is said and done. Players begin the game with a choice of one of five free starter heroes: The Thing, Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye, Storm, and Daredevil. Upon completing the game’s tutorial area, a second random starter character will be unlocked as well and after that players will need to pay to unlock additional members of the game’s currently 21 strong roster. Also note that the starter heroes tend to have various limitations and/or weaknesses that make them less powerful and effective overall than their paid counterparts.

Alternate costumes can technically be found as random loot, but their drop rate is low enough to be practically non-existent.

While a few cheap heroes cost “only” six dollars, the majority of characters are priced between nine to fifteen bucks except for Spider-Man, Iron Man, and Deadpool who all cost a whopping twenty dollars each. Altogether, it will take over three hundred dollars to unlock the game’s entire current roster and that is not even taking into account the various alternate costumes that generally cost between nine and fifteen dollars each as well. This is a ridiculous pricing structure that is excessive even by the genre’s standards. For less than the price of even MH’s cheapest characters, one can buy a copy of Marvel Ultimate Alliance on eBay as of this writing.

It is the hardcore Marvel fan who may end up the most frustrated with such elements of Marvel Heroes as the fact that one will often see seven or eight Storms, Daredevils, Things, etc. running around the environments at any given time. Of course, this is based on a super hero comic book universe and it would have been fairly easy to make a token gesture at explaining this all away. The fact that the game does not make even such a small effort says almost everything that needs to be said about it as a whole. In time perhaps Marvel Heroes may evolve into something more worthwhile, but as it stands right now the game really is only for those with cash to burn or prepared to play through the game’s various failings and other quirks. While Marvel Heroes may indeed technically be free-to-play, its best characters (in gameplay terms at least) lie firmly behind a pay gate and an expensive one at that.

The game does at least do an excellent job incorporating the larger scope of the Marvel Universe.

Marvel Heroes is a game that has been over five years in the making, but the actual final product (or at least as final as a MMO can get) does not feel like it in all the worse ways. For example, the surprisingly above average environments clash with the sub-par character models and animations even while the well written story and excellent voice acting are let down by the often rough art of the motion comic-style cutscenes. This is a somewhat sloppy and overall messy game that fails to capture the essence of its license again and again. While rarely an out and out bad game, it is also not a particularly good one either and falls very much into the category of mediocre. Developer Gazillion Entertainment technically has succeeded in their goal to make a Marvel-based Diablo clone, but only in the broadest sense of that term.

A code for cash currency was provided by the developer for review purposes and the game was played for over 60 hours including time with the beta. The title is a PC exclusive.

Also, feel free to follow the reviewer on Twitter @bigred_13 please if you feel so inclined.

Marvel Heroes Review

By Shaun K.

Does this free-to-play action-RPG MMO reward true believers or does it deserve to be banished forevermore to The Negative Zone?