‘Marvel Rivals’ Is a Chaotic Mess and One of the Year’s Best Games

It’s a great time to be a shooter fan, no matter what kind of experience you are looking for. Between a new Call of Duty, Overwatch 2, Counter-Strike 2, Valorant, Apex Legends, and Fortnite, the field is more crowded than ever. With new contenders popping up seemingly every other week, games release and die fast, such as Ubisoft’s “Call of Duty killer,” XDefiant which goes offline next June, just 12 months after launch, and PlayStation’s Concord which lasted just two weeks. 

Even with the name recognition of a brand like Marvel, the genre is notoriously hard to break into, but NetEase’s Marvel Rivals is off to a strong start. For the 10 million players who have clocked in time on PlayStation 5, Xbox, and PC since launch day on Dec. 6, it seems to be doing almost everything right. A fun gameplay experience with just enough new ideas? Check. Engaging heroes and characters that have a lot of tactical depth? Check. A smooth online experience that doesn’t crash? Check. 

While it doesn’t offer any genre-redefining features or major evolution, Marvel Rivals steps away from the hyper-tuning and balancing-centric design that whittles down the mass appeal of live-service multiplayer games over time to focus on delivering an incredibly fun, fully featured shooter that is hard to put down.

Because of that, Marvel Rivals has become something of a surprising underdog story despite having a globally beloved name tied to it. In a sea of very similar competition, it shows that you can make a game that resonates with players even if you aren’t offering them something they haven’t seen before. Here, great gameplay, characters players identify with, reasonable prices for cosmetics and transactions, and a rock-solid online experience come together to create a polished package.

Just different enough

Marvel Rivals is NetEase’s next big push into console and PC gaming. The Chinese publisher and developer is best known for its online mobile games and tie-in titles with IPs like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. However, it has slowly been pushing into the more traditional landscape — first with its multi-platform 60-player battle royale, Naraka Bladepoint (2021), and more recently with 2024’s Once Human, a hardcore PC survival game. 

Marvel Rivals is their biggest release yet outside of the mobile sphere, and to craft a hero shooter for the modern market, NetEase didn’t look too far for inspiration. 

Ostensibly, the game looks like a copycat of Overwatch. Many of its heroes and villains fall into the same archetypes or roles that Blizzard’s characters have made popular with mainstream players. Rivals’ take on Black Widow and Overwatch’s Widowmaker both utilize sniper rifles. Star-Lord can zip around the map like Overwatch’s defacto mascot, Tracer. The Hulk can jump into battle and soak up damage in a similar way to the equally oversized Winston. Additionally, the maps and mode structure feel almost identical.

However, while Overwatch is clearly the blueprint being used to craft Marvel Rivals, there are some interesting twists and unique ideas that shake up the formula. Maps can dynamically be destroyed in key areas, changing up players’ lines of sight. A huge tower in the center of an objective can be destroyed, removing that piece of cover and also opening up the field for long-range characters to be more effective. There can also be special events based on where players are fighting within the Marvel Universe, such as Venom-like symbiote platforms springing out from the walls on Klyntar. 

Being able to pull from 85 years of Marvel history to create the characters allows NetEase to develop a broader range of abilities to add to all of these characters too. Some of those are taken from previous appearances in media, while others are brand new.

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As seen in comics and the MCU movies, Black Widow can utilize melee weapons and martial arts as a close quarters defense if someone sneaks up on her while sniping, something Widowmaker can’t really do. While Hawkeye has his bow, he also has a sword that he can pull out to deflect projectiles. This is something seen used by Kate Bishop in the comics when she took on the mantle of Hawkeye, as well as a weapon Clint used in Avengers: Endgame (2019) when he adopted the “Ronin” persona. 

Even small side characters have been thrust into the spotlight here, and people have fallen in love with them. One such character is Jeff the Land Shark, who has been adopted by many characters in the comics because of his domesticated and affable nature. But here, he is far more terrifying, using a giant whirlpool attack that grabs opponents within, before dumping an entire team over a ledge to their collective deaths. His loving personality hasn’t been removed, he can also heal allies. Jeff is an adorable menace here, and he’s quickly become an internet darling. 

Almost everyone can be used up close and at range, whether they are pushing an objective or racking up kills. Marvel Rivals is liberating for a hero shooter, with the freedom to play characters multiple ways making it both fun and accessible in ways that most other ongoing live-service shooters quickly lose once the developers begin focusing on the larger “meta,” balancing the game for the optimal ways to compete for high-level players only.

Of course, there is a lot of mastery needed to make the most of those character abilities and kits, as Marvel Rivals has a low skill floor but a high skill ceiling. The game encourages finding a character and mastering their abilities or making use of the heroic team-ups. This is a brand new feature that draws upon the kinds of Marvel’s crossovers that make for climactic money shots in movies like The Avengers (2012). If certain heroes cooperate, then they can unlock powerful passive buffs or active abilities that can change the flow of a match. 

Jeff the Land Shark or Rocket Raccoon can ride atop Groot’s shoulders to gain extra damage reduction — a move pulled directly from the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. Hulk can pick Wolverine up and throw him at enemies, a concept fans will know as the “fastball special” from the comics. Some pairings offer passive upgrades for others, like the aforementioned Hulk-Wolverine combo, which buffs Wolverine’s abilities simply by being in the same squad as the Hulk. Some are a little more thematic, like Thor who can imbue his lightning energy into Captain America or Storm to electrify both of their basic attacks. 

It’s a really interesting evolution for the hero shooter gameplay that is easy enough to understand for newcomers and adds an extra layer of skill for veteran players. Competitors naturally gravitate towards picking complementary characters that unlock these abilities because they are effective in matches. It’s a simple, yet ingenious addition to the overall synergy of gameplay, and is surprisingly something that the genre hasn’t quite seen before.

Everyone’s broken, so no one is broken

With 33 characters and half a dozen abilities for each one, the developers of Marvel Rivals could easily have chosen to adopt a hyper-competitive, punitive balancing approach to these heroes, limiting what can be done with them so the opposing team could always counter a situation. Instead, they chose to make it fun.

So many of the characters have ridiculous damage potential, like Iron Fist’s ability to soak up damage as he punches and kicks opponents in the face repeatedly. Jeff’s whirlpool attack dooms anyone to a quick death if they are caught in it. Luna Snow and Mantis have powers that can constantly top up their team’s health for 10 or so seconds, making them all virtually impossible to kill for a short period of time.

While some characters could use some scaling back in terms of their damage output (Hawkeye), the chaotic nature and unlimited potential of so many overpowered characters thrown together at once makes for a riotous experience that’s refreshingly ludicrous. If everyone is broken, then no one is. 

But for the number of times players run into those situations of facing an extremely overpowered or effective character, there’s still a good shot at pulling off an insane play to take them down. Whether it’s using Iron Man’s ultimate ability to detonate a giant bomb that wipes out the opposing team, or carving a path forward by soaking up damage via Venom’s armor and high health, these moments are a power fantasy delight. After some patches, NetEase also hasn’t nerfed (scaled back) any character’s kit drastically, and it’s encouraging to see them stand by their decisions.

Already the Marvel Rivals community is breeding creativity and experimentation in a way that’s blown up on social media. Log onto X (formerly Twitter) or Bluesky, and there are dozens of clips of Jeff the Land Shark swallowing full teams, allowing Scarlet Witch to prime a giant explosion for an over-the-top round clear. Her move has a long windup (around five seconds), making her incredibly easy to pick off with a shot while she is readying it. But with Jeff at her side, the combination feels unstoppable. He can silence the battlefield long enough for her to charge up, then spit everyone in her direction, wiping them all out as Scarlet Witch tears the team’s bodies to shreds with chaos magic. 

Another popular combination sees Doctor Strange placing a portal above an enemy team on the objective and at his spawn point. A player using Iron Man then shoots his ultimate bomb attack through the portal like a meteor raining down on the opponents from above. 

Hero shooters that have leaned into the competitive side of the experience, like Overwatch and Rainbow Six Siege (2015), feel like they are on a perpetually balanced scale, changing to adapt as more gets added with every update. But (for now) the developers of Marvel Rivals understand that it’s an impossible task to satisfy everyone with never-ending micro changes, and rather than reeling in powerful characters that players have been dominating with during months of closed beta testing, they’ve simply release even more insane characters into the wild for people to have those power fantasy moments. Marvel Rivals is chaotic, but is managed effectively through a “more is more” philosophy.

That philosophy also means some of the more restrictive features in the genre can be omitted entirely. For instance, some games enforce “role queues,” a mechanic that prevents players from all selecting the same character class. Players instead must wait in line for their desired class, be it a Duelist (damage-focused), Vanguard (tanky, support), or Strategist (healer) before matchmaking to ensure a balanced team of six players across each class. 

This can improve balance but also drastically increases matchmaking times, and is something that weighs down games like Overwatch 2. But by allowing players to choose any class they want with no limits, the flexibility of Marvel Rivals means players can win with almost any lineup. In fact, they can win a match with a lineup of three support healers and three damage heroes, without a single tank. Players can have six damage-dealing heroes and still win. 

Sure, the team might struggle at keeping themselves alive, but if their damage output is high enough and they have good target prioritization, then they can make short work of everyone. It may weaken the game’s overall viability for top-tier competitors, but they’re ultimately in the minority, and Marvel Rivals is choosing to cater instead to a much broader audience just looking for a good time.

Learning the lessons

Arguably, Marvel Rivals’ biggest achievement right now is that everything just works. Seeing more than 10 million players in 72 hours without any server issues, major glitches, or game breaking hiccups is almost unheard of this decade, as almost every online multiplayer game has some kind of server issue in their launch window, with some even crashing before players can download the game client itself. Servers have crumbled with a fraction of the numbers Marvel Rivals is currently achieving. 

All of this, on top of launching with a massive character roster; 33 heroes is the highest day one lineup of any hero shooter in recent memory. Most games take multiple seasonal updates to even get close. 

The game has a wide selection of maps, a fully fledged ranked mode with its own rewards, a built-in tournament system and gorgeous visuals and animations. It also has a consumer-first approach that doesn’t lock heroes behind lengthy grinds or force players to skip ahead with real money to actually experience the game’s content.

However, outside of the heroes themselves, there aren’t many rewards and progression items to earn outside of the purchasable battle pass and skins that require real money, with just a handful of character skins and palette swaps to unlock by playing. Most other games of its ilk offer more to unlock by mastering a character or completing challenges as you play, but that area is rather sparse here. But, having just been released, it’s likely to improve as the seasons go on and new reward pathways are added. 

It’s incredible to see Marvel Rivals climb an uphill battle in a packed genre and live to see the vista from the top of it. Both online and single-player games are plagued with server issues, bugs, and problems these days that instantly stunt player excitement and hype. But, since its announcement, Marvel Rivals has ridden that wave and delivered something everyone can jump into and enjoy, while also fostering players’ creativity. Having hooked a massive audience and broken quickly into the zeitgeist, here’s hoping it can hold the course and continue delivering for years to come.

Marvel Rivals is now available free-to-play for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

From Rolling Stone US.