Marvel Rivals’ greatest strength is embracing the comics’ high weirdness
8.2.2024
By Thomas Wilde, Contributor
Many of Marvel’s characters have been in print for decades, and that’s long enough for them to have seen a lot of ups and downs. Even reasonably straightforward (or just plain iconic) characters have a few crazy stories in their back catalog, like “CapWolf” or that time Thor got turned into a frog. One of the great pleasures of being a long-time comics reader in the age of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been getting to tell new fans about the most bizarre moments in Marvel continuity.
Marvel Rivals digs deep into that continuity from the start. It’s a 6v6 hero shooter that pits teams of Marvel heroes and villains against one another in a newly fractured multiverse. There are elements in here from a half-dozen of Marvel’s various superhero continuities, from the MCU to the dystopian future of 2099 (as well as the recently introduced Web of Life and Destiny). And Rivals isn't afraid to add in its own unique twists, either.
The story begins with a meeting between Doctor Doom and his marginally more heroic counterpart from 2099. They don’t get along, and the resulting destruction creates the Timestream Entanglement: an unstable hodgepodge of different universes and timelines.
You play as the superheroes and -villains who’ve been pulled into the Entanglement and are now forced to defend it against the Dooms—the various antagonists from all the shattered worlds—and as well as one another, of course.
If you’re familiar with other hero shooters such as Rogue Company or BloodLoop, you’ll be on comfortable ground with Marvel Rivals from the start. The game is designed to create minimal friction. The first time I fired up the playtest, I was in a match within five minutes.
A round of Rivals is an explosive, fast-paced shooting match which captures a lot of the destructive spectacle of superhero fiction. In my first round, I took cover behind a building, and my opponents blew it up in order to get me. There’s a lot of room for satisfying, creative destruction, especially with high-firepower characters like the Scarlet Witch or Star-Lord.
That being said, the standard rules for a co-op shooter do apply here: specifically, Rivals is about your team, not you as an individual. Coordination, support, and communication are all key. Your team needs support players, and you need to be willing to help keep them safe.
Rivals’ roster is split up between Vanguards, Duelists, and Strategists, which can be broadly simplified into tanks, damage-dealers, and support characters. Ideally, you want to have roughly one Vanguard, two Strategists, and three Duelists to maximize your recovery and defensive options. A well-built team with less experience will tend to mop the floor with less organized opposition.
As of this writing, Rivals is still in beta, so many things about its mechanics and balance are subject to change. A few characters are really powerful in the current state of the game (particularly Venom), while others could use a few tweaks.
Right now, Marvel Rivals is a smoothly playable action game that’s easy to jump into and out of. It’s rare for a single match to go longer than five minutes, and a good number of the characters are deliberately simple to play. The Punisher, for example, is really just a Ghost Recon character in a superhero universe. Whether you’re a veteran of cooperative action games or a newcomer who just likes comics, there’s a character for you.
As a longtime Marvel fan, the first thing that got my attention about Rivals was its roster. At this point, you expect to see Iron Man, Spider-Man, and the Hulk in any Marvel video game. Those are the faces of the brand, so it’d be weird if they weren’t there.
However, they've left out a few big names for the time being, such as Captain America and Wolverine, and replaced them with some truly deep cuts. For example, the K-pop sensation Luna Snow was first introduced in a mobile game; Jeff the Land Shark is an in-joke of a character who’s only been around for a few years; and Magik was technically introduced in 1975, but has only gotten really popular in the last few years.
Even Rivals’ announcer, Galacta, has been plucked from obscurity to take center stage. She’s originally from a 2009 short story by Adam Warren that probably isn’t even comics canon.
It’s a lot of fun to see all the characters and settings make their video game debut in Rivals. One map is based upon the futuristic cyberpunk version of Japan that Peni Parker calls home. Another has you either rescue or attack Spider-Zero, a character who was just introduced in 2019 as part of the comics’ take on the “Spider-Verse.”
At the same time, many of the characters in Rivals take inspiration from several different parts of their individual histories. Magneto talks a lot about the island of Krakoa, which was the setting for a recently concluded story arc in the X-Men comics. Meanwhile, Hulk players have a character-switching mechanic that lets you play as an armed Bruce Banner, which recalls Mark Waid’s short-lived Indestructible Hulk series from 2012.
The result is a game that truly feels like it’s taking advantage of the sheer breadth of material that Marvel Comics has to offer. It hasn’t arbitrarily limited itself to a handful of locations or characters that offer the most potential transmedia synergy, as with several games that have drawn heavily on the MCU. Rivals seems to be happy to get as weird as it can get away with by including Namor and Hela and foregoing Deadpool and Daredevil.
There’s real care, research, and forethought on display here, which is funny, because it almost didn’t have to be here at all. Rivals is deliberately set in a blended-up, everything-all-at-once version of Marvel’s comics continuities, so the developers had every excuse to simply do their own thing with many of the characters, much like Insomniac did with Spider-Man.
It’ll be interesting to see where Marvel Rivals goes from here. Marvel has a lot of bad futures, alternate universes, and old storylines that Netease could adapt into a map or mission, like Marvel Zombies, Days of Future Past, and the Noir universe. There's even Marvel 1602, which reimagined many of Marvel’s core characters as if they’d existed in Elizabethan England.
Netease has crossed one of the big hurdles for any Marvel adaptation already, and that’s the simple willingness to be just as weird as the source material.
You can play Marvel Rivals for free on the Epic Games Store.