4 people found this review helpful
Recommended
5.8 hrs last two weeks / 161.1 hrs on record (6.6 hrs at review time)
Posted: 7 Dec, 2024 @ 7:50am

Very fun, but also very messy

Long story short, Marvel Rivals is a great hero shooter, one of the only games that manages to remind me of classic Overwatch. It's fun to jump in and mess around, there's an impressive variety of heroes and abilities that guarantees everybody can enjoy the game. The production quality is superb, too.

That said, Marvel Rivals' gameplay feels very "messy" compared to many other multiplayer games. Visual and audio clarity are non-existent, you will often be in very fast paced team-fights with no idea of what's going on, who's damaging you, where your team is, and which team actually has the objective. Characters shout voice lines constantly and there are a few characters which would just cover the whole area with very distracting visual effects.

This problem is made way worse by the fact that this game has ZERO downtime between fights. Everybody respawns in only 10 seconds, and since maps are very small they'll be back on the objective in no time. There are times where we would kill 3-4 enemies, and by the time we get to the last ones alive, the rest of the team would be back in 15 seconds.

There's no time to strategize, no time to position properly, and no time to decide who wants to switch to which hero. Hell, matches even start before everybody loads the game. People who don't have the game on an SSD often miss the first half-minute of a match, and you'll be wondering where your team even is.

Another thing everybody's talking about is the lack of a role queue. Most matches will have only one or even zero healers since nobody's picking support, and there isn't anything you can do if the other 5 teammates are all DPS-mains.

Playing support is also very rough. Movement abilities are crazy in Marvel Rivals, a decent player can just jump over your whole team and focus you like Venom and Psylocke. Unless your team can turn around for a few seconds (not going to happen when they can barely see what's going on), you're probably dead.

TL;DR

The game is fun and I'm really looking forward to playing it more. That said, I hope they can improve clarity and balance, and maybe tone down the pace of the game a little bit. At the very least make respawn times longer so we can actually capitalize on kills.
Was this review helpful? Yes No Funny Award