'Marvel's Avengers': Earth's Mightiest Incoherence

Marvel’s Avengers is a hero game with a thousand faces. You never know what game you will be playing any minute. Avengers might be Uncharted 3, it might be Destiny, it might be Aquaman: Battle of Atlantis. The cutscenes present a finely-polished AAA video game from 2020. The combat transports you back seventeen years and suddenly you’re playing a PlayStation 2 brawler you found at the bargain shelf of EB Games – complete with a missing cover. The menus are a byzantine labyrinth of loot, gear, abilities, and currencies. Now, you’re back in good old 2020. Every superhero game apparently has to be this now.

I could find a thousand games in the incoherent, barely-finished world of Avengers. But really, I want to focus on two games: the game developer Crystal Dynamics wanted to make, and the game their bosses made them make. In truth, I have no idea what happened behind the scenes in the development of Avengers. Jason Schreier has yet to crack this case. Maybe I'm wrong. Crystal Dynamics perhaps were inspired by Anthem and thought it would be a perfect fit for the MCU.

But I see a studio that made 2012’s Tomb Raider, a cinematic action-adventure that out-Uncharted Uncharted. They brought in developers from Naughty Dog and from Sony Santa Monica. These are people who made some of the best AAA experiences of the last decade. Square Enix told them to make a brawler with monetization hooks. You end up with Avengers, a game with a solid campaign in service to a bland looter shooter with very little shooting or very good loot. It is like if Wolfenstein II’s story was made for Battleborn.

As late as last month I figured Avengers would be a failure in an obvious, boring way. It would be simply a game not for me, maybe not for anybody, but that was fine. I do not need to play every video game in the world. I’m not offended by a gear loot game if that’s what the developers wanted to make. I definitely will not be playing or reviewing Godfall, don’t worry. (Really, I’m only covering this game because I happened to luck into an extra copy a friend of mine had.) But upon Avenger’s release, I was shocked to learn this was fairly close to something I wanted to play. Avengers has ambitions to be a playable Ms. Marvel MCU movie. That should have been great. 

Sadly, there was another, much worse game Avengers also had to be.

It is fitting that Avengers, of all IPs, ended up here. At Avengers: The Game’s best moments, it feels like a Sony AAA adventure game. And even those games are not really high art. The Last of Us 2 or God of War really fit closer to big blockbuster movies like The Avengers, not art house movies or  Oscarbait. Days Gone wants the audience of Iron Man 3, not Moonlight. These AAA story games often disappoint in similar ways. Things like Captain Marvel can brush up against feminist issues and coyly imply queerness in its lead. But then the movie never commits to any of those theme, and is ultimately a totally disposable product about nothing. The Last of Us 2 wanted to be this incredible tragedy. But really all that angst and agony was about justifying to the player why you’d spend thirty hours stabbing people in the throat – all while thinking you’re doing something weighty and important.

I like these AAA things and I like the MCU. However, I can be critical of both. At their best they’re Wakanda, reversing centuries of historical wrongs and inspiring the world. At their worst, they’re selling you Black Panther socks so that a Disney exec can add another story to his house. If you cry at Kratos reuniting with his boy, remember a Sony exec wants you to express that emotion by purchasing $300.00 toys and preordering a PlayStation 5.

Avengers: The Game has pretensions to be part of that AAA genre which is itself more ambition than substance. But Avengers also has to be in the much more nakedly commercial world of a looter shooter brawler. Crystal Dynamics seemed to have wanted to make a Last of Us, but they were told they had to make Anthem instead. This means the premium currency menus get to live right next to the well-written cutscenes It is like if you could buy the Black Panther socks in the theater while Killmonger asks to be buried at sea next his enslaved ancestors. The extractive capitalism is right there, unmissable.

It all makes me wonder who a loot game is really looting anyway?

I am just going to start calling the halves of this game “Good Avengers” and “Bad Avengers”. It never overcomes being two different, contradictory games smashed together. It is just easier to split them up.

Good Avengers is the story of Kamala Khan, AKA Ms. Marvel, a Pakistani-American girl who lives in Jersey City, NJ. That right there makes her one of the most interesting and exciting new heroes. I’m really glad Good Avengers introduced me to her. I grew up not far from her neighborhood. I think I got my car impounded somewhere nearby a spot where Kamala punched her first robot. The Indian diaspora is rarely featured in mainstream media, so I’m glad to see one in a cape. How many Muslim superheroes can you name? She is also a giant comic book fan, fitting for today's world where everybody loves the MCU. I’m sure somewhere in Kamala’s computer is her slash fic where Iron Man impregnates the Hulk. That’s just part of growing up as a Zoomer in the 21st century.

We first meet Kamala Khan as a little girl going to a comic book convention while chaperoned by her just WONDERFUL father. Abu is the fucking best. He’s every patient adult I’ve seen happy for their children while surrounded by incomprehensible piles of nerd shit they do not understand or care about. God bless you, bored parents. Later, after she’s grown up and has superpowers of her own, Kamala is incredibly excited to be around the Avengers. Kamala has infectious enthusiasm for all this superhero business. It defeats even my carefully-maintained wall of cynicism at times.

After the Avengers accidentally blow up the city of San Francisco, they disband in disgrace. However, their super science explosion somehow gave onlookers superpowers. Kamala has stretchy Monkey D. Luffy limbs that can also grow giant. All those people become “Inhumans”, who are basically Mutants in every way that matters. They’re ostracized, feared, and could be as read a metaphor for queer communities. This includes the bad guy working to “cure” them against their will, reminding me of Conversion Therapy horror stories. There is even what is obviously a Sentinel at the end. Kamala discovers some dark truths and has reunite the Avengers. Then they all team up to fight an evil super scientist named MODOK.

As for why these are Inhumans and not Mutants is a long story, mostly involving Disney being petty bastards. It is another reminder that even at the best times, Good Avengers is a product first, a sincere story second.

A lot of people on Twitter have mocked the character design. They say it looks like some porn parody of the movies. But after a few minutes I stopped comparing this version to the MCU. Yeah, it would have been better if Crystal Dynamics had gone more cartoony with the style or if they could afford the license to Robert Downy Jr.’s face. I say this game's version is good enough. Troy Baker as the Hulk is great because he's playing a sad White guy, and if you need sad White guys, Troy Baker is your man. Laura Bailey's Black Widow might be better than the movie one. Nolan North as Iron Man sucks. He's just playing Nathan Drake again. Finally, MODOK, despite being an evil scientist with a giant head, has a great arc. The MCU needs more body horror.

There are a few really solid moments in Good Avengers if you want a cinematic adventure game. I actually think the best part of the game is the platforming segments. Ms. Marvel has super jumps and stretchy arms to swing like Spider-Man. These moments are very similar to climbing in Uncharted or Tomb Raider. They’re pauses between the action for character building or pacing. There is a particularly awesome escape sequence on a space station. And I really loved Kamala discovering a community with the other Inhumans. It is this moment where she finally gets acceptance for who she is, without needing to be something else.

I wish I could tell you the ending was fantastic. But this is where Bad Avengers comes in, unfortunately.

Avengers, Good or Bad, never runs well. I was playing on a base PlayStation 4. I’m sure on other platforms the game will run better. I’m sure in the coming months patches will stabilize it. But for me this whole game ran like a really old beat-up car. The kind of junker you have to drive in the right lane on the Parkway because the wheels shake when you go over 70 MPH. Sometimes it felt fine. But you always knew, under the hood, something terrible was about to happen. Then it would never start again.

Something terrible happened to Avengers in those last few hours. I was moving fine, then I must have hit a bad bump or something. The game never drove right again. The frame rate would drop to nothing and the screen would blur, like you were playing underwater. Captain America fell through a platform during a cinematic chase scene. The audio broke so completely that Hulk’s grunts got repeated on an endless loop. After that a few cutscenes loaded without sound or subtitles. This was not a grand triumph for Kamala and her heroes. It was limping a broken vehicle home, praying that the wounded engine could get me over this last hill. In the last battle Hulk died and my NPC partner could not revive me. Just that mechanic would not work suddenly. It took me four tries to get through his part. Even without touching the multiplayer, which I've heard is really not good, Avengers is a mess.

Good Avengers is a game desperate for just a few more months of tinkering. However, Crystal Dynamics had to make Bad Avengers. All that energy could have gone into making something like, I don't know, a superhero campaign with more than three supervillain boss fights in it? Maybe give us more focus on Kamala and her moveset instead of trying to spread it out across six different heroes whose abilities are mostly the same anyway? Even the story could have focused a bit more on Kamala and her identity crisis. It is so close to feeling finished. Such a shame.

But Bad Avengers does not want to be a story. It wants to devour your life. It wants your friends’ lives too. It wants to be a loop of endless tedium as you constantly increase numbers on a menu somewhere for no purpose other than to increase numbers. This is not a goal. It is moving figures on an Excel spreadsheet. You're volunteering for a second job twice as pointless as the one you get paid for. If you are desperately in need of 100 hours of your life gone – maybe you made some kind of bargain with a djinn with a weird sense of humor or something – that is the only thing Bad Avengers can offer you.

Bad Avengers is the kind of experience that makes me hate the word “loot”. It makes me hate people who like loot. Loot can be really cool and exciting in video games. Not in this. Bad Avengers makes loot seem like the most boring thing in the world and people who play games about loot the most boring people alive. It is an endless quest to find new pants for Hulk that make numbers go up. You don’t get to see the +3 pants outside of the menu, but just know, Hulk now hits for some half a percentage point more damage. Isn’t that exciting? Wouldn’t you want to spend hours and hours collecting more trash so you can be stronger to be able to collect higher number trash?

I did as little as possible of Bad Avengers. Maybe that makes me a bad critic since I purposefully ignored as many systems as possible. But the entire tone of that game made my skin crawl. I never read the menus too closely. There's like eight currencies and different kinds of items. A lot of items told me they were great at increasing my “SPIN”. Fuck if I know what “SPIN” is other than something to do with quantum mechanics and electrons. All I did was put on the bra strap that made Kamala Khan’s numbers go higher. I ignored all the bits about finding new gear. I ignored every bonus objective and every side chest. I ignored every NPC who wanted offered me more busywork for more rewards that unlocked more busywork.

You know, I can almost understand why somebody would get really into Borderlands or something. If you find really cool new guns that shoot in really cool new ways, that can be exciting. Nothing exciting happened in Bad Avengers. The most interesting gear I ever found had a minor effect of reducing Ice damage. I did one optional side mission the entire game and it was horrible. Sadly, even Good Avengers is padded with content that clearly was intended to be a multiplayer side mission. They’re all tiresome and bad. You have to do like half a dozen of them.

What could make either Avengers better would be really solid combat and interesting missions. That never happens. Every side mission feels the same. You run through a town. You beat up robots. You go inside a building. You beat up more robots. Then you get a small reward that is not worth the time. Then the combat is is endless waves of... oh yeah, more robots. (You really do feel like you’re playing an Avengers movie, only that movie is the abysmal Avengers: Age of Ultron.) Sometimes the robots fly. Sometimes the robots shoot slow-moving projectiles. The solution to all of them is to press circle to dodge everything. Then wail at them with a mix of light and heavy attacks. Every character has basically the same general list of verbs too. Iron Man can shoot turrets, so can Hulk. Ms. Marvel has a super move, so does Black Widow.

There is definitely more to Avengers. I can see it in the tech trees for all the characters. There actually are really deep and rich combos and a few interesting techniques. None of them were unlocked for me during the campaign. All the characters have their own separate level bars, so the tech tree will remain mostly empty the whole game for everybody. I love that at the end they made me fight high-level enemies with the Hulk, who I had not played since the beginning, and had like two skills unlocked. Iron Man apparently has rockets and I never learned how to use any of them. I never even needed to block. If you put the work in you might find a combat system to love. I never found Avengers to be worthy of my effort. I especially felt no reason to try harder when the game would so often flood my screen with enemies and projectiles. The combat becomes a garbled riot of nonsense.

A few characters feel okay in this system. The combat is really scaled for human-sized characters like Captain America or Black Widow. It never feels good to be the Hulk. You think, you’re the INCREDIBLE HULK. You can punch Godzilla if you wanted. You should be able to just dive right into a big melee of robots and wail on them. Nope. Your HP bar will get shredded in seconds. It is so unsatisfying. Iron Man is probably the worst character in the game. He’s slow. He’s awkward. He can fly but it feels like fucking shit. In flight mode he has the turning circle of an aircraft carrier and the nimbleness of the Democratic Party Platform.

I accidentally punched Iron Man about thirty times. He’s a robot. All the enemies are robots. He looked just like them. Oops.

The saddest thing about Good Avengers or Bad Avengers is that it had to be made this way. A ten-hour Kamala Khan game might be a solid contender for many Top 10 lists. This hundred-hour monetizable nightmare is easily the worst game I’ve played this year. I cannot stress how little business Avengers has in being a Destiny game. I also cannot stress how little respect I have for whoever took Crystal Dynamics and made them make a game like this. You can clearly tell which parts of this game were made with care and inspiration. And which ones are made by over-worked crunching employees desperate to just get this miserable fucking game done.

Some boss somewhere had a terrible idea to make a lot of money. We all suffered for him. If he had just been mildly greedy, the kind of greed that makes MCU movies in the first place, it would have been at least respectable. Instead, I am embarrassed for this Avengers. That it got made halfway-well at all is goddamned heroic. But they the developers doomed from the start. Their boss made sure they had an unwinnable mission. Maybe Loki works at Square Enix and this whole game is just one massive bad joke.

What’s galling to me is this: Square Enix made this game. They were the bosses who insisted that Avengers had to be this horrible stillborn thing. Just six months ago they released Final Fantasy VII Remake, a purely single-player game with no Battleborn ambitions at all. That game has four distinct characters with unique gameplay. It has a story that feels a finished product. It is a strong confident game made by people who wanted to make it. (Someday, I promise you, I’ll review it properly.) Avengers is not that. Why did Crystal Dynamics not get the same chance that Tetsuya Nomura’s team had?

And how come Warner Bros is making the same mistakes with poor Rocksteady and that Suicide Squad game? I can't wait until 2024 and I can copy paste this exact review again.