Marvel's Avengers Open Beta is a Hot and Confusing Mess

Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics' Marvel's Avengers game just had its 2nd online BETA over the weekend. With this BETA session being open to all PS4 owners, we took the time to check it out and see what this game was all about.

I'll be honest. The initial reveals and subsequent trailers and even gameplay videos for the Square-Enix published Avengers game didn't look appealing to me. Character models and facial animations looked very stiff and lifeless and when we finally did get to see a glimpse of the combat, it looked very bland. I'd even say that it hearkened back to those movie tie-in shovelware titles from previous console generations, at least in terms of how sluggish it looked. Though it isn't fair to judge a game from an outside perspective alone. That and my fondness for anything superhero related urged me to give the game the benefit of the doubt.

The open BETA was just the thing I was looking for. I'll admit that because of how negative I perceived the game from the initial trailer alone, I had no interest in really following news pertaining to this title. So after hearing that an online BETA was going to take place throughout the month of August, it piqued my interest as I assumed that the game was simply going to be a contained single player hero romp.

Finding out that the game had online multiplayer functionality was already intriguing. But also the fact that it would be so involved as to require online BETA tests fascinated me even more. What would the game have you do with other players to even warrant an online BETA test? Let alone multiple sessions of it.

Underpowered Opening

The weekend arrived and I get to boot the game (I appreciated that you were allowed the pre-load the BETA before the servers went live). Suffice to say that the intro stage left a lot to be desired. The game tries so hard to sell itself by giving a glimpse of what each of the main heroes can do within a small window of gameplay but the transitions between them felt so jarring that it got a little irritating. Not only were my initial impressions of how each hero controlled weren't great right off the bat, but you get so little time to actually use them before the game forcibly shifts you over to the next hero and tries to teach you their controls and gimmicks. Some transitions even had almost on-rail segments that were all spectacle and no substance to the point they either were impossible to fail or had no consequence if you made mistakes. I might be overly harsh about an opening level but I will say that it wasn't great.

Once you get past the intro, we're treated to a level that takes place after the events of the opening level. The Avengers have disbanded, Nick Fury has disappeared, and evil is afoot. For this run, you take control of the Hulk and a newly recruited Kamala Khan. Unlike during the opening stage where the heroes had a few extra abilities unlocked, the 2nd stage has your characters at the base level of 1 with only a handful of abilities at your disposal. And while this mission isn't all that great, it does give you a better sense of how the combat plays out as it has you play as each of the 2 characters for a decent amount of time.

User Interface Issues

Here is where I think the game should have a major overhaul from the get-go. The UI is a functional nightmare. There's a moment you have to flip a few switches as Kamala in order to open a door to progress through to the next area. And while I have issues when games sometimes show the player too much information as to where to go and what to do, this does the polar opposite and doesn't convey what exactly it is that you have to do at any given moment. Icons that show the player what you can interact with don't appear until you're basically right up in its face. This alone made the simple task of flipping 3 switches more trouble than it was worth.

When it comes to combat, the game will have visual indicators for when enemies are about to fire at you with a ranged attack but won't show a small arrow to signify if there are enemies around and behind you out of view. This becomes even more apparent with how low and close the camera is set to your character. It's hard to get a good visual of how many enemies are around you and, as far as I could tell, there didn't seem to be any way to recenter the camera to snap to where your character is currently facing. The copious amount of motion blur, camera shake, and inconsistent frame rate doesn't help either.

After the 2nd mission is done, you're brought to the Chimera. The sort of HUB base area thing that's not called the Helicarrier but is basically the Helicarrier. Here's where the last of player-direction UI rears its ugly head once more. Doc Bruce Banner asks you (playing as Kamala Khan) to interact with a few objects around the base before you're allowed to access the War Table which lets you select the next mission. With rooms not having any proper labels to them and no visual indicator as to what and where the exact object is that you need to interact with, you could get lost in this giant ship not knowing what the things are that you have to find. This comes into play again later when you're asked to look for a specific room.

Once that's all done, you finally get to select the next mission which has Hulk and Kamala go through a snowy plain. Since you're selecting this mission on the War Table, you get a visual of what the online lobbies look like. And while I'm not sure if you can actually invite other players to join you for these missions, especially since it requires both Hulk and Kamala to be in the squad for cutscene purposes, the menus to do so are at least visually present.

There is technically a way for the game to reveal where items are, where your main objective is, and shows were your teammates currently are. And that is by pressing Up on the directional pad to activate what the game calls the "Tactical Awareness" button. However, the icons don't stay on for very long and there doesn't seem to be a way to tweak the settings for it in the options. It would be nice to have some sort of outline or icon over your allies so that it's easier to find them around the map and discern them amidst the crowd of enemies thrown at you. The same goes for giving enemies possibly some sort of outline or small arrow above their heads as it can get really hard to see sometimes when you're fighting.

While I wasn't exactly enjoying my time with the game so far up until this point, this snow mission is what started turning me around towards it. With this, I was getting a better idea of what the rest of the game can actually look like in terms of level design. I noticed how large this stage was and it offered a few deviating paths from the main objective. Granted that the rewards for exploring weren't all that great for this mission but it was more so than what the previous two stages had.

The Gear System

As early as the 2nd level, the game introduces a Gear system. Each character can earn their own set of gear which increases their stats and sometimes offer perks and passive abilities. This doesn't sit quite well with me as this can just devolve into you earning a ton of trash gear with minuscule stat difference where only the one with the highest number matters. What I can appreciate is how creative some of these extra perks and abilities can get. You have a few standards like a percentage chance to cause a small area-of-effect explosion during your combo finisher to a more crazy ability like inflicting Pym particles that can shrink enemies, causing them to deal less damage and take more. It is disappointing that the gear applies no visual difference to your character model when equipped.

You are sometimes able to find chests lying around that contain either new gear or materials that can upgrade gear around the stages. We did notice that while claiming gear and materials aren't shared by all players the moment the chests are opened, players can individually approach the box to claim the rewards for themselves. This makes it so that teammates won't have to race each other to open chests but will reward those who take the extra effort to hunt them down. The same goes for resource drops that tangibly falls out of enemies or boxes, save for those found in chests. If a chest drops only resource materials, that will be shared across all team members regardless of their position upon the chest being opened.

Uninspired Mission Structure

After the snow mission, the game then opens up with more missions on the War Table and grants you the ability to matchmake with other players or invite friends on your PSN list to join you. The game doesn't allow for duplicate heroes which is a shame. No teams of 4 Hulks running around wreaking havoc on an AIM facility.

While these missions can be fun to run around in with your friends, beating up villains and their cronies. This does worry me about the state of the overall mission design come full release. What it boils down to is that missions become very mundane as objectives tend to just be to defeat these baddies, go down this elevator, stand on this platform, defeat more baddies, maybe save this one guy, defeat even more baddies.

Most team-based multiplayer games these days have roles and archetypes to help synergize playstyles and cover your bases. But what if everyone was just a damage hero? All of the characters have a sort of uniform control scheme where you have a light combo, a heavy combo, a 3rd person styled aim-and-shoot ranged attack with the L2 and R2 triggers, and what appears to be universal jump heights and sprint speeds. Sure there are a few differences such as Black Widow's guns and Iron Man's repulsors shoot further and straighter than Hulk throwing a rock or Kamala stretching out as fist as their ranged attack. But then it's strange seeing Black Widow keep up with a sprinting Hulk and a flying Iron Man (who's supposed to be able to outrace jet planes).

I understand that this is still a superhero game that's meant to appeal to a wide audience and can understand the design aspect that missions can be beaten with any character. But seeing that this game is trying to follow the moniker of Games as a Service, it's hard to imagine that this type of simplistic level structure, almost identical character playstyles, and the weird decision of making the chest rewards not shared, will keep players interested over a long period of time. I'm hoping that this is only an issue present for the BETA since it is meant to be a testing ground for online servers and that the full game offers significantly more variety.

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Writer’s take: I did enjoy the combat, especially after you’ve unlocked more character skills but the way things are, it’s still a mixed bag.

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