Marvel’s Avengers

I remember a game called Marvel Heroes. I remember it because I played a lot of it, but you can’t play it anymore. It was a free-to-play Diablo-style game. It shutdown in 2017, but I don’t recall ever learning why. It seemed pretty popular at the time and the developers kept cranking out new stuff for it. If I were a deeply cynical person, I might assume Marvel Heroes had to die so that Marvel’s Avengers could live.

Avengers has a surprising amount of things in common with Heroes. They both sort of flatten out the differences in superhero powers to make the game easier to play and understand. Some characters are shootier and some are punchier. Some can fly, but the others can grapple or double-jump or stretchy-arm. Everyone has four slots for equipment that are wholly separate from what they look like. They’re total nonsense, like I’m choosing which rib cage is stronger for Hulk, but Heroes did this too.

Like Heroes, you can spend a whole lot of cash money on your character’s appearance by buying costumes. Like Heroes, you can also just play the game a lot to accumulate the currency you need to purchase these costumes. They rotate on a daily basis, so you don’t necessarily get to choose whichever you want unless you want to spend cash. I never accumulated enough in-game currency to buy a costume by the time I got to the end game credits.

Heroes was free to play. Gameplay was entirely unlimited, though I was limited to a selection of free heroes to start. Though the characters weren’t free (without playing for currency or paying cash), it was adding characters all the time. It was alive for four years and had over 63 characters before it shutdown. Avengers is full retail price, and seems to be giving heroes away, but we’ll see if that continues beyond the current selection. Since release, they’ve added two versions of Hawkeye, and a Black Panther expansion is on the way. I can’t figure out if that expansions will be free or not.

Whether directly inspired or not, I think it’s pretty clear that Avengers learned a lot from Heroes. But is Avengers good? It’s okay. It’s not endlessly playable like Heroes though. It’s obviously a more expensive game and that translates to a better looking game, but it’s also a game with less to do, less to do it with, and just as much, if not more, exploitative monetization of things that you want in a superhero game. I think I was having more fun with Marvel Heroes before it shutdown.