The gameplay isn’t revolutionary, the voice-lines and overall vibe of the game are cringe-inducing, and it isn’t lost on me that anything related to super heroes these days is adjacent to anything to do with disney adults, but yeah: Marvel Rivals is pretty neat.
The casual hero-shooter-brawler-coomer-bait game has some interesting things going for it: the inherent bonuses that some heroes get with other heroes, like Spiderman and Venom gaining HP and Damage when on the same team, is a pretty unique idea that probably serves to keep the game casual, since it also means that when a character is meta, so too are their inherent bonus partners. (And who cares about the meta?)
Funnily enough, the competition this game is boasting with Blizzard’s Overwatch (2) comes at a time long after the latter horse had been beaten to death by its respective community: people are just not happy with Overwatch, and there hasn’t been a better time for the genre’s vacancy to be filled by a game that is actually fun to play.
NetEase Games, the developer of Marvel Rivals, is pulling no punches when trying to recreate that spark that Overwatch once had on the gaming community. Not only is the gameplay, in many cases, reminiscent of that distant hype-train that was Overwatch 1, but the characters are just as intentionally ripe for R34 artists to make a living off of.
That last point isn’t a joke, either. Overwatch was single-handedly (no pun intended) kept alive by the degenerate amount of saucy material created by third parties over the years. Without that culture gripping the 3rd legs of the Overwatch faithful, the game would have been replaced years ago. It seems Rivals is aware of this, and is looking to hedge their bets against a short-lived cycle by making their characters ultra-bangable, and in the exact same way as Blizzard’s work.
Two different characters are shown above. Both young women who function as hybrid tank-fighters in their mechs. I’d ask why the strange similarities, but if it ain’t broke, I imagine it’s better to not mess with it. And, in any case, I’m not actually that stupid.
As for gameplay, Spiderman is the most fun character ever created in a game like this, period. Cheers.
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