After all these years I get to see what all the fuss was about for this game. It really had a tragic history as the game decided to be a live service title and those never do well. I contributed to this since I never got the game. Live service can work to be sure but I generally think it needs to be a free to play title. Even then the market is pretty saturated at this point. The game goes for dirt cheap nowadays though and you get all of the unlockables by default so that’s a lot of content. Ultimately it is a great game and I hope one day we get another big budget Avengers game that is made with a proper ending.

The story starts off with you playing as Kamala. She was at the big Avengers expo when they are attacked by a bunch of robots. They manage to stop the invasion but not before thousands of people are murdered and a genetic weapon is exploded which forcibly alters the DNA of many in attendance. These people are being referred to as the Inhumans and they are being hunted by AIM. AIM now controls the entire country and continues to spread. The Avengers have broken up and are too depressed to do much about this. So Kamala will have to save the world and reunite the team in the process.

It’s definitely an ambitious story here. The game decides to not actually have the Avengers present for nearly the entire base story. I feel like you could only make this decision if you actually think that you’ll be around for years and years. So I do like the confidence, I can really appreciate that. That being said, it is a risky move for a reason. You’re probably looking forward to properly playing as Captain America and Thor who have not really had a triple budget experience prior to this. Hulk and Iron Man have had their fun before but not the rest of the team.

We do get the 4 DLC update stories though so that’s pretty fun to play through. The Avengers are finally back for those and we gradually unlock more and more characters. There are well over 100 missions within the game and tons of items to buy and such. The menus for upgrading equipment and stats can be a bit overly convoluted though. There are just so many menus. It reminds me of a mobile game where you decide to download it in year 3 and there’s just so much going on. I think the best games can mitigate this to an extent but Avengers does feel pretty overwhelming at times.

Like I mentioned, the gameplay is really why you’re here though. It’s very solid with a lot of care being put into the combat system. You have a whole lot of attack options at your disposal so you can approach a fight in different ways. Additionally you have numerous takedown animations and can equip up to 11 at a time. Mix that in with the dozens of costumes for each character and you’ve got so many options at your disposal. It’s really a fun thing to see.

Keeping up with the best gear and equipment can be a bit of a nuisance but it’s not completely necessary. There was just one fight that was particularly tough for me and that was the Maestro. He beat me several times so I actually had to pay attention to my gear. All of the DLC missions auto scale their level to match yours which is why they are considerably tougher. Definitely keep that in mind since you may even want to pick a weak fighter for that reason. Go too weak and it’ll feel just as painful though.

The graphics are definitely really good. This feels like 1st party Sony from the character designs to the destroyable environments. I don’t have any real issues on the visuals. The soundtrack is a bit generic though. Now the biggest issue here are the loading times. They are absolutely brutal and far longer than you would expect. The first time you boot up the game for each session can take almost 5 minutes to actually start playing. Then between every mission you get close to 2 minutes of loading times.

These really add up as you play the game and it’s the one big technical issue here. You’ll run into some visual ones as well but this is one that actually affects gameplay which is what makes it a really big deal. It’s too bad they couldn’t have optimized this a little bit in the final dlc update or something. That would have been cool but making everything free offline was already a big step so I suppose I won’t say much here.

Each character has a very unique moveset so you don’t have to worry about them all feeling the same. I enjoyed playing as Iron Man the most because I always love beam spamming. The other characters were all fun too and the main story forces you to play as quite a few of them which is a good thing. Otherwise I have a tendency to just stick to my favorite character the whole time. I found Black Widow to be the toughest character to play as so it’s no coincidence that I lost several times when playing as her. I doubt they literally made her the weakest on purpose or anything but that would be funny if that was the case.

Overall, Avengers is a pretty great game. Definitely one I would recommend checking out. You have a lot of parkour and high octane action. It’s the kind of 3D experience I feel like we don’t see a whole lot of from Marvel outside of a few characters. Spider-Man typically gets a lot of action but otherwise Marvel isn’t super active. We need more games like this, but done offline. It’s a shame we couldn’t get to the end of the story here but the journey is still long enough to make this a W either way. You’re getting a pretty decent amount of content within this one and that’s not even counting all of the side content. It should keep you busy for quit a long while. If they ever make another Avengers game then I’ll be ready to check it out. Hopefully that can arrive sooner than later.

Overall 8/10