I had high hopes for Marvel’s Avengers. As written in a previous post, superhero games can either be well made or unplayable. From everything I had read regarding Marvel’s Avengers, I thought this game had potential. I didn’t buy the game immediately after it was released which is something I usually never do. However, my fiance brought it home for me one day since he knew I wanted to play it. Marvel’s Avengers is a mediocre, and disappointing superhero game.

The game opens with a celebration titled A-Day. A-Day launched the new HQ in San Francisco along with a helicarrier powered by a Terrigen Crystal. The Avengers have pulled away from A-Day celebrations after an attack by Taskmaster. Unfortunately, the helicarrier is destroyed leaving the surrounding citizens in San Francisco being exposed to the Terrigen mist. The Avengers were blamed and were forced to disband. Kamala Khan was exposed to the Terrigen mist and has been hiding her powers. Five years after A-Day, Kamala starts to investigate “AIM” the replacement for the Avengers, and discovers some incriminating evidence against them. She’s on the run to protect her family and bring the Avengers back together.

Marvel’s Avengers claims to be an “Avengers” game when really it’s centered around Kamala Khan aka Ms. Marvel. I loved playing as Kamala. She’s a character I didn’t know much about and her positivity helped bring back the Avengers. I do believe the game wasn’t marketed as well as it could have been. The title of the game is Marvel’s Avengers, so I went into playing this game believing I would be playing an Avengers game. Kamala is on the cover, although a lot of the gameplay is her story. Besides Kamala, the Avengers do sound like the characters they are supposed to represent. I thought the voice acting was spot on and the way the characters were designed felt true to the comics.

In my opening paragraph, I stated how Marvel’s Avengers is a mediocre game. This game could have been so much better. I hated how I couldn’t switch heroes in a mission. The heroes have various abilities that allow for collecting resources. Resources are used to level up the Avengers. For example, if I played as the Hulk on a level, there might be a collectible to unlock as Black Widow, but since I can’t switch hero mid-mission, I’m not able to unlock this collectible. It’s annoying! I don’t understand why there couldn’t have been a button on the controller allowing me to switch between the heroes.

Let’s talk about the missions. There are the main campaign missions contributing to finishing the main story along with side missions. I found the missions were repetitive. If I played a side mission on one map, it was often repeated in the campaign. It seems Marvel’s Avengers used repeat maps to try and finish the game faster. It’s lazy to create missions as side quests only to replay them in the main campaign.

Finally, I disliked how the Avenger’s health worked. As an Avenger loses health, one of the few ways to regain health was to punch green boxes on the maps. This would allow an Avenger to heal. It seems odd that a god of Thunder doesn’t regenerate health, isn’t he a god? Doesn’t Captain America’s super-soldier serum allow him to regenerate health automatically? The health system could have been designed better to be unique to the specific Avenger I was playing as.

Overall, Marvel’s Avengers was a fun game. It could have been amazing if the game was tweaked. I must not be the only gamer who feels this way because Square Enix lost $105 million from this game. To bring life back to the game, Square Enix is introducing Kate Bishop and Hawkeye as DLC. I’m afraid it’s a bit too late. I’m undecided if I would invest more money into the game or pick up the game again. I give Marvel’s Avengers a 6/10.