Right after we left for Christmas break, one of the biggest games of recent memory hit the market: "Marvel Rivals."
After nearly a decade of Overwatch's monopoly on the hero-shooter genre and its slow descent into making the game completely unplayable, Marvel was able to step up and try to capitalize on Blizzard's mistakes.
We now get to play a strategic team-shooter game with characters that every type of Marvel fan knows. Finally, we have a game that isn't Lego, where I can play as Great Value Aquaman and face off against a lady that talks to squirrels.
This game does a whole lot of things right, especially the things that Overwatch players have been begging for in the last 2 to 3 years.
They brought back a 6v6 team composition with open queue role selection. Nearly every other strategy shooter has shifted towards 5v5, despite fans hating it.
The roster at launch was a whopping 33 characters, ranging from the X-Men to the Avengers to the… West Coast Avengers? I guess Tony Stark is really only worried about New York and maybe Boston. Either way, there are characters from all across the Marvel Universe for players to enjoy.
What about all the people to voice those characters? Yeah, that was a smash hit, too. Yuri Lowenthal returns to his role as Spider-Man, so now we get to witness what the 10HP no-name bad guys had to deal with in the two PlayStation games.
James Arnold Taylor drops his lightsaber as Obi-Wan and voices Magneto. Nolan North voices Rocket Raccoon. I can only wonder what would happen if Deadpool got added to the roster. There's also Thor voiced by Travis Willingham, who is Colonel Mustang from "Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood."
Alright, so we have a good roster, good voice actors and light-speed matchmaking with a developer team that actually listens to their fan base and is churning out updates every month or so. How is the gameplay? Well…
If you've played even five hours of Overwatch, it's not hard to see that this game is nearly a carbon copy.
Map layouts are nearly identical to those of Overwatch, and character loadouts are the same way: Captain America is a combination of Doomfist and Brig, Rocket is Baptiste, Magneto is a weaker form of Sigma, Cloak and Dagger is Kiriko, Hawkeye is Hanzo, Black Widow is Widowmaker, and those are just the ones off the top of my head.
Yes, I completely understand that Overwatch characters are heavily based on the same archetypes as Marvel heroes are. It's hard to think of completely original things when it comes to games like this one. I get it. I think of it as Overwatch stole character ideas, and Marvel stole the gameplay ideas.
As of right now, I do think Rivals can be an Overwatch killer, mainly because they came at the right time. Overwatch is continuing to ignore fans and drop either game-breaking or completely forgettable characters alongside minimal changes with anything else.
Meanwhile, Marvel Rivals is something like Overwatch that can give them a change of pace.
I think it's going to come down to who listens to the community more in the upcoming months. The next few patches to come from Rivals are going to be a huge tell on its success for the coming year.
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