For a comic book mash-up, Marvel Rivals is hard as hell to read
Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.
There's a fun game you can play while playing the (frequently unfun) new online shooter Marvel Rivals. I call it "Hey, Which Overwatch Character Is This Weird Version Of A Marvel Person Semi-Actionably Ripping Off?"
Some of these are pretty easy, even if certain traits have been split between characters: Futurist Spider pilot Peni Parker gets D.Va's e-girl/mechgirl swagger, for instance, while Bruce Banner gets her central mechanic of being reverted back to a weaker form when killed, and being forced to survive long enough to re-summon your super-powered buddy/body. But some are more 1-to-1: Squirrel Girl (bombs, immobilization) is Junkrat with a more chipper, less apocalyptic reskin, and Rivals' version of beloved weather witch Storm is essentially a flying version of hoverboarding DJ Lúcio. Sometimes the abilities get split up in weird ways, admittedly: Magik, for instance, has a lot of the disorient-through-speed-and-teleportation gimmicks of my beloved former OW main Tracer, but doesn't get access to her signature rewind time ability—instead passing it off to Black Panther and Psylocke as part of the game's Team-Up mechanic, which rewards players for picking characters who synergize together by having them gift each other new abilities.
As one of the sole mechanical ideas Rivals can claim all for its own, Team-Ups are a clever touch—even if they speak to the one aspect that the new shooter really should have stolen from Blizzard's massively successful hero shooter. Which is to say, readability: The ability for a player to look at the allies and enemies in front of them, see what people are doing and what their abilities mean, and use that information to meaningfully contribute to the fight.
As a very old man, I was introduced to hero/character shooters with Valve's Team Fortress 2, a game that prioritized readability above almost every other factor. (It's why, despite now being a turn-me-instantly-to-dust 17 years old, the game has never added a new character to its core nine classes.) You could look at any battlefield in that game, instantly see who was where, and doing what, and make decisions about how to alter those match-ups. (Not always meaningful decisions, as a thousand failed Spy backstabs in my history would suggest, but at least they were well-informed fuck-ups.) Overwatch already blurred these lines, both by adopting the "throw a hundred characters into the mix" ethos of games like DOTA, and with its reliance on cosmetics that make it hard to determine at a glance who you're facing down. But Blizzard also put a ton of work into making each hero's ability sets instantly recognizable, and that clarity allowed players to know how to prioritize who to engage with, who to try to shut down, and who to run the fuck away from.
With the addition of Team-Ups—which are, undeniably, cool and exciting, despite my issues with them—Rivals takes combat that was already on the muddy side and dumps in even more flashy dirt and water. Call it a skill issue, but the joy of a hero shooter, for me, is in knowing what kit each player is bringing to a match-up, knowing how those powers counter each other, and finding ways to survive or thrive in those fights. (I have very mixed feelings about Valve's own latest entry into this genre, Deadlock, but it nails this aspect, especially in the early going where duels happen more frequently than massive melees.) Marvel Rivals fights turn to chaos so quickly that adding one more set of moves into the mix, optionally available depending on team compositions, turns the whole thing to sludge. (Again, I might just be screaming "I am very old" at the top of my lungs with some of these complaints; it's possible that the spry supercomputers younger players have running in their heads crunch all these numbers instantly.)
Where I've had fun with Rivals, it's typically been in those places where it most closely resembles old-school Overwatch. (A game I fell off of, hard, around its highly mercenary rebranding as Overwatch 2.) Finding your niche in a team still feels great, as does sensing that moment when the snowball is just starting to roll down the hill and you're about to start dominating the other team. Some of the heroes are genuinely fun to play with, for all that they've been cobbled together from parts; as I've been familiarizing myself with the game, it's been hard not to default to just playing adorable heal monster Jeff The Shark every single match.
Weirdly, the one itch the game doesn't scratch is my love of Marvel. Sure, it's fun to hear Yuri Lowenthal (Spider-Man), Josh Keaton (Iron Man), and Steve Blum (Wolverine) reprise roles from earlier Marvel games (including my beloved Midnight Sons). But Rivals is so interested in recreating the Overwatch dynamics that it rarely, if ever, feels like the superhero throwdown it should be, either in its fluff—with weird lore, costumes, and a time-tossed array of levels pulled from alternate universes that just happen to look a lot like OW maps—or its play. These don't look, or feel, like any Marvel fights you might be familiar with from comics, TV shows, or films, and that's because they're not trying to be. They're re-skinned Overwatch, and that's a real bummer in a universe where a genuine Marvel hero shooter game still doesn't really exist.