Those of you who grew up with The Bible will recognize instantly the opportunity Marvel Rivals grants the player - the opportunity to meditate on mortality itself while spending time inside of a fish. I didn't understand before that I craved this state, a fishy state, where the cares of the world disappear beyond a wall of cool meat.
The Overwatch Clone designation, which I was happy to employ when it suited my rhetoric, will now be discarded completely after only a few days of playing. I am grizzled and ancient enough to remember when all first person shooters were called Doom Clones. Hero Shooting is old enough to be its own, real boy now. And anyway, I think they're probably doing Overwatch better than Overwatch is. So.
Because it exists within the parentheses of a solidified genre, there are things we don't need to discuss because they're too low to the ground - part of the structure. You have champs and you engage with the various Reindeer Games they've established. There's a little twist, not necessary at every turn but readily expandible, where some characters have abilities they get from other heroes - Spider-Man grants Squirrel Girl a special crowd control Web Bomb because they met in college or something. That's the lore, get locked in. There's other wild ones, too - if Hela gets a kill, she can instantly rez Loki or Thor. They get health if they haven't died yet, but that's not as cool.
The main thing about the game is probably the art. I think it "feels" tighter and more responsive than Overwatch, legibility is always gonna be a challenge when you have to learn to counterplay like thirty-three fucking kits, but I'm starting to file away the voice lines and get prepped for some truly filthy ults. But it's the energy. They have absolutely executed the superhero fantasy with versions of these Mighty Heroes that take nods from wherever they think is going to be the coolest - I keep trying to find a word that isn't "heroic" to describe it, but there might not be one that does what that word does.
You can tell when artists are having fun, and these artists are having the fucking time of their lives. I want art that dreams and ranges wide, I want to be inspired by artists, I want artists to trick my ossified, cynical brain into thinking there could be something like a hero. I keep seeing these weird turns toward realistic depictions in gaming art, even of things like elves. I don't need art to show me real things. I think if you are out here trying to make a realistic elf, I got a bunch of questions for you and you aren't gonna like any of them.
(CW)TB out.
