Marvel’s Avengers Beta Preview – Earth’s Potentially Mightiest Heroes

This past weekend, I had the chance to partake in the private beta for Marvel’s Avengers, the upcoming superhero action game from Crystal Dynamics. Alongside three MonsterVine friends/co-workers, I suited up to battle AIM-bots, Abomination, and an inconsistent framerate. Still, there’s a lot of potential for Avengers as a multiplayer title.

The beta began with the A-Day stage that was shown off at last year’s E3. It’s a heavily scripted segment that shows off each character’s powers and abilities rather well, though it feels more like an interactive showcase than a full-fledged level. After a couple of small levels that show you the ropes, you’re given the ability to take on missions with friends or random players. This is where the real fun started.

While the singleplayer side of Avengers feels a bit hollow so far, playing with friends is a blast. While coordinating over Discord, the crew and I would freely swap characters, tell each other where to go, and just mess around while doing dumb things as each character. We felt like a real team, which is what I assume Avengers is going for. It may be distracting in story segments, but it’s far more fun overall.

I’m hoping there’s a bit more mission variety in the full game, as quite a few of the demo missions essentially placed us in a room and told us to kill a set number of enemies. These missions were understandably dull after the first couple tries, as they blended together and became more of a grind than anything. There wasn’t really any story or flavor to them, so I could see these missions being a chore in the full game.

Then there are missions like “Code Green,” which features narration from Bruce Banner and side-story content that was genuinely intriguing. I’m really hoping most of the missions are like this in the full game, as they added to the plot and characters while maintaining a similar gameplay loop. Having a few missions like this for each Avenger, like the Comic Book Missions in Marvel Ultimate Alliance, would be the best way to keep side-content interesting.

The beta featured Iron Man, Hulk, Ms. Marvel, and Black Widow as playable characters in the multiplayer portion (with small segments as Captain America and Thor in the prologue.) I found Iron Man to be the most fun character, as his flight abilities and wide range of unique abilities kept me from ever getting tired of playing as him. On the other hand, stretching and growing as Ms. Marvel is an incredibly satisfying experience, as you just plow through foes using giant appendages and goofy rubber powers. Each character has plenty of personality in their respective gameplay styles, which I found to be quite reassuring.

From what I saw and heard in the beta, a few of the Avengers feel a bit out of character overall. Tony Stark leans a bit too close to Nolan North’s excellent take on Deadpool for my liking, relying on enthusiastic quips and references more than most takes on Iron Man. Taskmaster gets jobbed pretty much immediately, which feels out of character, as does Black Widow’s somewhat dull personality. I think the character writing and voices could use a bit of work to improve some of these personality issues, but it isn’t a dealbreaker.

Heavy action segments would heavily dampen the beta’s frame rate more than a few times, which is hopefully a beta-exclusive issue. I can see how the game would be rather intensive when it comes to resources, but it really got quite choppy at times.

Overall, Marvel’s Avengers shows quite a lot of potential. There are some rough spots that could use some work, such as the frame rate and cookie-cutter grind missions, but the fun of playing as the Avengers with friends in a source-accurate action game can’t be overlooked. I look forward to playing the full game to see if Avengers can truly live up to its mighty potential, or if it ends up as more of a Great Lakes Avengers experience.