I'm not a big fan of hero shooters. I've sampled Overwatch and Team Fortress 2 before - the latter of which I would like to give a second chance - but it's never had much appeal to me. I think the central issue is that hero shooters demand everyone to play their part and support one another, teamwork being essential, and rarely is a team comprised of people who even know each other let alone get along. Couple that with poor balancing of classes and an ever-shifting meta and it becomes less about mastering the inherent game mechanics and more about exploiting an eternal cycle of nerfs and buffs. It leads to a greater discontentment and, despite the rising levels, the feeling that the time you've spent playing hasn't amounted to much learned skill.

I started playing Marvel Rivals in July at the behest of a friend, and in that time I've garnered over 100 hours in the game. It's my most-played game of 2025, which is funny because I don't feel like I've invested much time into it. The time cost is intentional, of course, and as I purposefully withdraw from the constant meta of the game I want to look back at it and explain why I believe my complaints with the hero shooter genre still stand after all of this playtime.

Personal Score

this criteria uses the DecentFilms rating formula.

Letter-Grade Recommendability: C-
Time Played: 103 hours
Achievement Progress: 13/49 (26%)
Artistic/Entertainment Value - ★★☆☆☆
Gameplay Value - ★★★☆☆
Moral/Spiritual Value - 0
Age Appropriateness: Teens & Up

Marvel Rivals, as the name implies, takes the iconic superheroes of Marvel comics and translates them into three gameplay classes. You have the tanks, known formerly as the Vanguards, who have the most health and are designed for front-line fighting; the damage-dealers, or Duelists, who are about laying down consistent fire and getting the most kills; and the healers, or Strategists, who provide healing and buffs to the other two at their leisure. I found that I prefer Duelists most, particularly Magik and Iron Man, but I play pretty flexibly to suit the team I'm queued with; my top picks for Strategists are Ultron and Mantis, and my picks for Vanguard are The Thing and (most recently) Thor. Teams are composed of 6 players each, and generally it's a good idea to have two of each class present for a well-rounded composition.

While my experience with all of the heroes Rivals has to offer are limited - I haven't played a significant amount of them - I will say that the ones that I have played have a good amount of depth to them. Magik is by far my most enjoyable hero, with her emphasis on melee combos and constant movement something that I love in action games. Ultron after that does a great job of subconciously exerting his guidance on the rest of the team, influencing teammates with suggestive drone healing and turning the game into somewhat of a real-time strategy - albeit with units having free will. The Vanguards are the least mechanically complex, but The Thing's jab-haymaker combo is very satisfying to lay out healers with. I think that my taste in mechnical depth is satisfied pretty well with the heroes and their abilities.

On the subject of the heroes, I don't think I can properly review the game without addressing the obvious. These are Marvel characters, ranging from steady classics like Captain America and Spider-Man to modern inclusions like Luna Snow and Peni Parker. The presentation of these characters is fairly surface-level, with really bland dialogue and banter from the voice actors, but for a lot of these characters this is a more faithful depiction of their comic-book likenesses than they've seen in years; take Iron Man, for example, who somehow manages to escape the curse of being a Robert Downey Jr. knockoff and sounds closer to the Eric Loomis characterizations in Marvel vs Capcom 3 and Earth's Mightiest Heroes. It does help that the voice actors have some experience with the world of Marvel, most notably Lenore Zann for Rogue having voiced her in the original X-Men animated series and its 2024 sequel. It lends a level of authenticity to classic fans like myself while still having a bit of the MCU's smell on it (see Ultron).

With all of that being said, the actual gameplay is mixed. You have a few different gamemodes you're queued into at random: Domination, which works the same as your standard King of the Hill mode; Convoy, that one escort mode every hero shooter has to do; Convergence, which is really just Convoy with a capture point at the start; and Resource Rumble, which is Domination but the control point moves about a large open map. Of these modes Domination was probably my favorite, as teams usually figured out the map quicker and could coordinate strategies based on the static level design. Resource Rumble is by far the weakest, with the teams being so spread out across the map that fights were generally single engagements that didn't contribute much. I don't have much to say about these modes, as they're pretty standard for the genre. They did however recently add a Marvel Zombies mode with some of the least-satisfying horde gameplay ever, but it was clearly an afterthought to tie into the Disney+ show so I won't go into it.

I do have quite a lot of gripes with the general gameplay, though. The game has always had some slight balancing issues, with many characters being far stronger than others due to comic-book accuracy. Scarlet Witch is an excellent example: her gameplay consists of essentially holding down mouse-click for a damaging beam, deploying Dark Seal bubbles that stunlock anyone who walks into them, and can phase out of reality to fly away. This is leagues easier than most characters, and this goes for several others as well. Nothing is quite as irritating as playing a character like Iron Man, leading my projectile shots from a distance, only to be deleted by Hela who clicked on me three times with little effort; or playing as Magik, constantly weaving about and managing distance for ambushes, only for Punisher to stand still and kill me with a basic hitscan gun. It only feels worse because on top of a ten-second respawn timer you have to walk all the way back to the objective at a pretty sluggish walk speed, meaning that you waste an incredible amount of time with each death. This is why most people don't play Vanguards and the Duelist class takes up 20 of the 45 total heroes as of this review. The game provides avenues for skillful play, yes, but it also encourages and rewards choosing characters with the safest meta.

The matchmaking is also pretty bad. In fairness I haven't played competitively in games in quite a long time, so maybe this is a problem in general, but it feels like every match is either an utter victory or an utter defeat. It doesn't really matter how well you're personally playing, because playing a hero shooter means that you have to hope everyone else is on par with you or else you can't do your job as well. This makes most matches feel very unrewarding as you get a loss on your record and a possible demotion in competitive rank regardless of personal achievement. There are exceptions, of course, but those well-earned close matches are uncommon and if anything feel like an elusive hope that keeps me playing rather than something to expect from the game.

I covered the general Marvel aspect of the game already, but Marvel Rivals has a unique style all its own and it's something I have mixed feelings about. This game does look very nice in a lot of areas, with very vibrant colors and flashy animations, and I can appreciate the artistry at work in the destructible environments - even if they don't have much gameplay utility. At the same time though it's built upon the Unreal 5 engine, which feels like it actively tries to desaturate the colors, and unfortunately it causes the game to have a very Fortnite look to it. The other major aspect of the visual design is the character models, which are purposefully larger-than-life and a bit overdetailed. I do like how the heroes have very exaggerated physiques and are generally attractive, something that goes naturally with superheroes, but comparing a classic superhero costume to its Rivals adaptation shows how overdesigned the style is. Modern superhero media has a fixation with making character designs really busy and detailed, I don't like it elsewhere and I don't like it here either. I also don't like how a lot of the female characters are designed stockier and buffed to near musclegirl standards, notable examples being Angela and Rogue; I imagine they did this to make them fit the Vanguard class, but I think it looks ugly and far too different from how the character is built everywhere else.

I also don't like the Chinese influence on the game. That may sound stupid to say, given that this is made by NetEase Games with director Guangyun Chen, but I think this is important. Marvel is an American cultural product, steeped in western aesthetics and ideas, and I think that this clashes with the more eastern aesthetics that these developers bring in. It wasn't too obvious at the start, but the game has put out a lot of chinese-inspired costumes for many of the characters, and most notably in the "Heart of the Dragon" season they embraced it with their imagining of Daredevil with demon powers and the name Dizang. Ever since the MCU rolled onto the scene there's been a crisis of identity over what the world of Marvel should look like, ultimately leading to the messy fracturing of a multiverse with infinite and meaningless variations. Marvel Rivals is a symptom of this greater problem, so it was inevitable for the game to apply its own eastern touch, but I still dislike it heavily and feels like it becomes less Marvel as a result.

In the spirit of other popular Chinese games, Rivals is free-to-play as well. The primary income for this game comes from its battlepass system, locking some of the more iconic (and some pretty egregious) costumes behind a paywall. There is a currency to purchase cosmetics in the form of Units, but these come very slowly, and I generally had enough units to buy one costume per season. This holiday season is an exception, as the game's reached its first anniversary and is temporarly more generous with its units, but otherwise it still heavily encourages using real-world purchases for cosmetics. My friend and I have been freemium users and intend to remain that way, and while we haven't been challenged in that approach the game's predatory microtransactions are still a mark on its quality even if it is just apeing the modern gaming landscape.

In summary, I'm sure Marvel Rivals is one of the better offerings in the hero shooter genre right now. I think it still suffers for this, though, especially since it adapts a world of exciting superpowers and the heroes that wield them in such a clumsy way. I don't particularly regret the time I have put into the game, and I'm sure I'll still play it on and off, but I think that it's been an ultimately unsatisfying experience.