‘Marvel Rivals’ is a fun, but forgettable ‘Overwatch’ ripoff

Ever since Overwatch took over in the gaming mainstream, it seems every company wants its piece of the pie within the hero-shooter genre. That’s how we’ve arrived at NetEase Games’ Marvel Rivals, the latest live-service hero shooter from the Diabolo Immortal developers.

I was recently invited to the game’s closed beta that ran from July 23 to August 5. Featuring a who’s who cast of Marvel Comics characters, Rivals is the physical embodiment of a Disney executive going around asking why the company doesn’t have its own version of Overwatch. (I’ll be mentioning this game a lot, fair warning). However, the twist here is that Rivals is quite fun if you don’t mind it being a ripoff of other, better games in the genre.

What is Marvel Rivals

Let’s start with the basics. Marvel Rivals is a 6-vesus-6, third-person multiplayer hero shooter in a similar vein to Battleborn or Gigantic. Like other games in the genre, players can choose between a cast of 20+ Marvel Comics characters split into three classes: Vanguard, Duelist, and Strategist. Vanguard is your classic tank — beefy builds that soak up and deal heavy amounts of damage. This is one of the smaller groups in the game comprising The Hulk, Thor, Venom, Groot, Peni Parker, and surprisingly Doctor Strange and Magneto.

Duelists are assault-type characters focused on combat and mobility. You’ll find the most characters in this group to play around with — the most common I saw in my playthrough being Black Panther, Iron Man, Magik, The Punisher, Spider-Man, and Storm.

Finally, we have the strategists, who are your classic support characters either dealing out health and buffs to their teammates or debuffs to opponents. During the closed alpha testing, there were only four support characters: Loki, Luna Snow, Mantis, and Rocket Raccoon. But with this closed beta, Adam Warlock and Jeff the Shark were added to the roster.

Credit: NetEase Games

Once your team of heroes and villains is chosen, you’ll take this colorful cast of truly well-designed characters and compete in three game modes: Convoy, Convergence, and Domination. These are the same modes from Overwatch to a tee, minus Domination which is ripped from Call of Duty and Battlefield. Convoy has you either defending or attacking an objective as it travels on a set path to an endpoint.

Convergence is a best 2-of-3, King of the Hill-style battle as teams duke it over control of a single point that changes location. And then, I don’t have much to say about Domination cause I could never find enough people to play it, but allegedly teams face each other for control of multiple points on a map.

Playing Marvel Rivals

Credit: NetEase Games

I think a lot of the fun I had playing the beta is that it’s extremely polished. It helps that NetEase had a template to work from, since Rivals is unashamedly an amalgamation of all that came before it. Even the maps feel like Overwatch and I haven’t played that game in over six years. So imagine the déjà vu I felt loading up Rivals and immediately feeling like I had somehow downloaded the wrong game.

However, the game falters when it comes to hero kits. The sets of weapons and abilities in the game can be poorly matched to their characters and unappealing. Magneto, for example, is a tank class with a telekinetic shield and mind-controlled rocks, which feels off for his character, and is boring to play. Bruce Banner transforms into the Hulk, but once transformed, his abilities are limited to smashing and shooting gamma rays.

Some characters do fit their hero kits well. Iron Man as a duelist/assault class hero with rockets and an ion beam makes sense, as does the Punisher with his guns, and Spider-Man with his swinging and punching. But Doctor Strange as a shield character is both unfaithful to his character and dull in gameplay.