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Marvel's Avengers - The Definitive Edition
Simbiat
Simbiat

Don't buy this game. And not because you should not be able to buy it anymore (besides maybe physical copies, if any), but because you should not support this level of "we don't care about our product", which this game has. Every time I encountered a bug in this game, I was like "Let's finish this after all, maybe the story will end in some interesting way, or maybe the side quests or DLC quests will be interesting, maybe all of this will be worth it", but then I encountered a bug, that blocked my progression entirely, and I just had enough of this.

My first bug was in mission House Call. The whole mission was a huge bug, and this has been reported at least 2 years before support for the game was shutdown. 2 years. And it was not fixed, because no one cared about it. For a lot of people this bug would make the level completely unplayable (even without the need to reload checkpoints at certain points).

Then I had several instances of heroes just hanging indefinitely in places, where mission needed to end or when it was supposed to move to different location through a lift. All heroes in a team would just stand there, playing their idle animations and nothing was happening, and you had no control, and, of course no ability to reload checkpoint - just to exit the game entirely.

Then there was a mission where I got the most weird bug, which is, apparently, not a bug, but design. The objective is to destroy 2 transformers or something like that. To do that, you need to stand near one, hold action button so that your character pulls out a tube-like thing from the wall, and then you kick and punch that tube till it blows up. But there is a catch: if you kill all enemies before you interact with either of the transformers - you won't be able to interact with hem ever again. There will be no prompt, the transformers will not receive any damage, nothing. The only solution is to reload the checkpoint and interact with both transformers before killing off the enemies, that is you will need to, probably, absorb some damage while doing this.

The very first side-mission for Captain America had a similar objective, but with 3 transformers, and it did not work for me at all, even if I did not kill anyone (which is practically impossible, if your companions are doing that for you). Maybe this was because I was playing as Iron-man, though. Which should not be possible, because the mission clearly states, that Captain America will be selected, but then before the mission starts I can just change him. Looks like even this feature was not tested by anyone.

Issues continued till the last mission in the main scenario. Firstly, there were some switches that are extremely difficult to see even for me, a person without color blindness, but that's ok, maybe I do not understand something. Secondly, there was a place, where you have a fight with something like a mid-level boss, and after that you need to follow Hulk again. You start the new section in an area, which has a chest in it. If you open that chest and then jump on to the next platform, 95% chance you will die, because platform collapses under you the moment you land on it, because it was on a timer, that was not telegraphed from the start (there is a purple thing there that appears a few seconds after the cutscene). But that's only half of it - after you fall, you will get a black screen with nothing happening, until you reload checkpoint.

That's not all. Then there was another place, where you need to hit 2 switches with you shield to drop down a climbable wall. I did not even see those switches, until I was able to actually reach the next platform, for which that wall was required. Because Captain America did find invisible footing somehow. Which is fine, it does not stop progression, after all. But then there is another bug right after that, which does. You need to stand on a button and hit another 2 switches with your shield. Easy enough, but... One of them does not react to your attacks at all. Reloading checkpoint does not help, and you need that switch to progress further. I've wasted half an hour trying to find a way forward, until I gave up on this game completely.

Even without the bugs, though, it's not that good of a game. Combat system did not inspire me, I did not feel the need to change combos that often besides the fight with Taskmaster early in the game. It was too grindy for me, although it may be somewhat more fun with coop. Some design elements here and there were questionable, for example through-out the bases there were these switches, that were supposedly used by workers on those bases, but the way to interact with them was to hit them 3 times: why would workers need such a way to interact with their machines? This was stupid even for comics-based world. Let alone that in some instance they stopped working for me until checkpoint reload.

The story and missions around that story were also mostly bland, and it was clear that things were designed with idea of online multiplayer coming before anything else. For example the way heroes stopped in place during certain cutscenes, including those, that were not movies. The maps were large, which could be fun, but they were large only for the sake of prolonging your journey to the final destination, rather than for the sake of you actually exploring those maps. I mean, design of those maps is ok in general, but you are pushed into exploration through random markers in your HUD, that move you away from the main mission, and not  through some peculiar structures in the distance.

At the same time, the game did have some good moments, when I would say I was immersed in the situation. Even the opening sequence, when you play as Kamala and explore the A-Day convention. At first, I was skeptical about it, since it's just walking around, when this is supposed to be an action game, but it did help to get acquainted with Kamala, and it reminded of those short intermissions in Mafia, where you drove some passengers around or walked a girl home. It built an atmosphere.

There were also some really good chase scenes, which felt really intense and looked awesome. But even they were spoiled by camera that took away your control at specific moments, forcing you to readjust its position, or a very obnoxious rumble from the gamepad. Oh, it's horrible, since almost every little interaction causes vibration, and sometimes you get a slight vibration when there is seemingly nothing trigger it, except your character maybe touching some junk on the ground during a turn. But those chase scenes were so great, that it did not matter.

I believe that this game needed more of that. Because that's what made Marvel movies so popular initially and why DC tried to copy them. I remember I went to 1st Iron-man movie with my mom. She did not care for Marvel or super heroes in general, but for some reason went with with me, and she really enjoyed the movie. As she explained it, she was able to turn off her brain and just watch the crazy (yet mostly logical) things happening on the screen. Yet it was not just action, there were emotions there as well, there was character development. Somehow recent movies do not have that, or at least they do not balance things properly.

If this game was made with focus on intense chases fighting scenes, high-stakes and high-reward moments instead of finding ways to keep people in game to spend more money - it could have been a good game even with its simplistic plotlines. But alas, it did not. Even though I played beta and did not have high expectations, I was still very disappointed and frustrated, to an extent that I would call this one of the worst gaming experience in recent years. Yes, worse than New Tales from the Borderlands, which was just cringe all over.