Comments of Square Enix‘s upcoming Marvel’s Avengers, which has taken an amusing nickname from many pundits of the ‘Marvel’s Advengers’, being ‘quickly forgotten‘ or having ‘lots of flash with little substance’ has now opened itself to the whims and opinions of PC gamers as the title opens its Beta access to everyone over the weekend.
Somehow, in some god-forsaken way, it has managed to become worse than it was on the PlayStation 4, during the beta access that you could allegedly access for free using Amazon.
The core of the game obviously remains the same: various heroes really only have superpowers that allow them to move through levels, and enemies take a surprising amount of damage even when you’re playing as the Incredible Hulk; expect to button-mash until enemies finally fall over and you move onto the next button-mashing bad guy until that one dies.
‘Hulk smash’ has been nerfed to ‘Hulk poke, over and over again’.
Learning new combos and abilities ultimately turns into a pseudo-Dynasty Warriors where you’ll find a single efficient combo and abuse it endlessly to make the unending hordes of faceless bad guys fall over; you might mix it up and use others, but you’ll inevitably go back to the one combo and repeat it.
Gear is a massive pain as well, and you’ll need to change out your gear constantly (an arduous task at best) for minor incremental increases to stats in a repetitive process that takes far too long, and is fascinatingly uninteresting; you’ll also need to grind it throughout your entire playtime.
Combine this with a massive slew of advertisements for various services, and Marvel’s Avengers is frankly appealing to a very small and niche crowd that doesn’t mind piecemeal content combined with a repetitive and arguably lifeless gameplay loop.
All of that remains, but now there are a few new caveats: 4K resolution is fundamentally broken in the current build of Marvel’s Avengers, no matter what GPU you’re packing in your rig, you’ll struggle with rough textures and struggling framerates in the resolution.
1440p offers solid performance in the current beta, yet the 4K resolution being broken has a few more consumers worried that haven’t taken heed of the plethora of red flags that has been slapping everyone in the face for the past two months.
Load times are similarly a bit of a dice roll; there were times when load times would take upwards of thirty seconds on an SSD, and other times it would be almost instant. Shifting the title to an HDD for thoroughness exacerbated the problem exponentially.
Ultimately, the Achilles heel is that the core gameplay loop feels like a grind after fifteen minutes. Enthusiasts could squeeze a bit more life if the game presented itself well on the cutting edge of resolutions, playing the screen archer and taking photos (at 1440p the game is gorgeous), and it’s likely that Square Enix/Crystal Dynamics will eventually figure out what is causing the issues at 4K. That’s simply the least of the concerns right now with the title scheduled for release in twelve days, on September 4, 2020.
