Marvel Rivals is a just released f2p Marvel 6v6 hero shooter game – basically Marvel Overwatch.
I have grown so sick of the whole Marvel universe after it has saturated the last 10 years of all media more than anything ever has before, so I was predisposed to dislike this game, but to my surprise it’s actually really good.
I tend to think people use the word “clone” overly broadly to describe games in the same genre or that are chasing the same trend. However, it fits in this case. Everything about the game design screams “Overwatch clone” – the gameplay and modes, the hero ability designs, the pace of play, the map design, the art style.
But it works. I’ve only played about 2 hours but it’s a lot of fun. It runs very smoothly for me and I’ve not encountered any sort of bugs or obviously work-in-progress parts. I’ve only tried out 4 heroes so far but I’m liking the design so far. Healer classes (at least the two I’ve played) still have to do a lot of other support and/or fighting to be effective. There’s a good balance between long range, short range, and melee attackers. I haven’t played enough to say it’s well balanced, but it has a decent variety of combat styles.
It has a nice hero tutorial where it walks you through the unique abilities of each hero but only for about a third of the roster. It’s a good system and they would’ve benefitted from having tutorials for every character on launch. It’s a lot to learn when you first start, since people are going to be blasting you with abilities you’re unfamiliar with.
I didn’t give a deep look into monetization but it looks like you’re just buying skins and other cosmetics (alone or through a battle pass) for a f2p game which is pretty standard and acceptable.
It’s cross platform. One trick with cross platform games is to balance how much auto aim you give gamepad users. I don’t know if the game is well balanced in that respect, but I will note that early on in my first few games I had extremely easy opponents that were predominantly on console and as it placed me in higher skill games it became more PC players, so I suspect the auto aim isn’t too strong.
It has a massive player base already. I guess that’s to be expected if you have even a halfway decent Marvel game. It’s been over 350k concurrent players on steam alone pretty constantly, which doesn’t include other PC stores or other platforms.
A few complaints. It doesn’t seem like it has a lot of map/game modes. You have a payload style one and a capture the sector style game mode for quickmatch. I haven’t played competitive yet, maybe there are other types. There’s also what sounded like a straight deathmatch game that I didn’t try yet.
And this one design decision drives me absolutely nuts and I hated Team Fortress 2 for it – if you have an attack/defend style map, you need to let both sides attack before declaring a winner. This is so obvious that I’m baffled when games do it as they do. Maybe if you had it perfectly balanced so that the offense and defense wins 50% of the time each, you could say that one round determines the winner. But that’s generally not how it works – maps are usually designed so the attackers win about 80% of the time. So if you play a round of payload, and the attacker wins… I mean… did they really? They were going to do that 80% of the time. The defenders never really got a chance to take their turn.
The way to solve this, of course, is to then flip the map and start the clock. If the attackers won in 14:30, then give the other team 14:30 to win. If they do, they win, if they don’t, they lose. IIRC Overwatch did this properly, but lots of games do not, which is immensely unsatisfying to me because it basically leaves all the games of that mode without a clear winner. It really bothers me.
There’s also no way to continue playing as a team if you get matched with people you like (except of course if you’re in your own party). You click play, you’re matched with other players, you have your round, and then that’s it - you’re all broken apart and sent to other games. It would be nice if the game had an option for a rematch people could vote for, or a “continue playing with this team” option so people could opt-in to having the same teammates over several games. It feels very impersonal to have different teams every single time.
But overall I think if you’re interested at all in that sort of game you should definitely try it. Long long ago I used to organize SDMB games of overwatch and if this ends up being very popular I could see maybe doing the same thing. Come to think of it, maybe I should set up an SDMB discord server where people can meet up and find people to play with. Add me on steam (code 10413476 or the same name as on the board) if you’re interested.