Marvel Rivals is here to stay, here's what it does well
Occasionally it's marvellous
Hello! Welcome back to a "normal" edition of Hit Reload. I was back to work on Jan 2, but I'm writing this now during the first full week back. Christmas breaks are pretty good though, we should have a few of those a year.
How did you spend your Christmas? This varies from person to person, but I alternated between watching bad action movies, eating, and playing video games, something that perhaps isn't all that unique. I found myself not that interested in Escape From Tarkov's wipe, but I've now dipped in as a group with my long-term Tarkov duo partner. We've been teaching her husband, and I've been playing it less as my main game but more solely with them, where my role is to sneak around the game's beginner map helping our little squad do their tasks.
With the pressure to power through the early levels relaxed a bit, I'm enjoying the progression more. One quest I've always hated is to kill three enemy players with pistols. Here's me smashing that out in a single raid. Very relaxing.
Anyway, let's talk about Marvel Rivals shall we? I was wrong to write Rivals off, because it's one of the biggest shooters in the world right now and it has a couple of nice ideas I'd love to see someone else riff on.
When it was announced, I wasn't certain who Marvel Rivals was for. I'm a lifelong comic book fan and the idea of a new universe of gunslinging Marvel heroes that didn't look like their comic book counterparts seemed ridiculous to me. After playing it ahead of launch during the beta, I wrote it off.
A month on, though, the game has passed its first big test. You can't judge a free-to-play game by its player numbers on day 1, but looking at it a month on from release, it’s looking very healthy. The easiest player information available is the Steam charts, where peak times have 420,000 playing through Steam. More people will be playing at any given time on the Epic Game Store, PlayStation 5 and Xbox. For context, these numbers are enough to make it the second-most-played game on Steam at the time of writing. The numbers to indicate "success" for any game will vary, but Rivals has sure made a splash.
If you're unfamiliar with Marvel Rivals, the important thing to get across is that it is just Overwatch with a Marvel license. The main event is 6v6 PVP where you fight over a control point until the bar hits 100% or you push a little Marvel-related cart until you get to Marvel-related gate and something happens. It plays like Overwatch, it feels like Overwatch. Just, y'know, with a Marvel layer.
I think this is where my big issue with Rivals comes in. I played a lot of Overwatch, but I never liked how little impact the guns felt like they had. Firefights felt like weightless affairs, two players lazily circling each other until someone died. Marvel Rivals is in a similar spot right now, with ultimate abilities being the only decisive way to kill someone. Otherwise, fights are slow skirmishes, with a frontline that rolls backwards and forwards. The real difference is that it is a third-person shooter whereas Overwatch is an FPS, but this helps with the amount of melee combat you need to do. The shooting feels imprecise and messy, but I'm not sure I can think of a cleaner solution.
Despite this, there's no denying Marvel Rivals has some magic to it. The hero diversity is surprisingly good: there are 33 heroes currently and they all feel distinct. My earlier worries that Marvel Rivals would just be "Daredevil has a gun now" were totally unfounded and actually the heroes feel pretty true to themselves. Yes, Punisher has a shotgun, assault rifle, some rocket launchers and a machine gun turret but heroes like Spider-Man and Wolverine feel just like they should. I'm taken mostly with Captain America who fills the game's tank by alternating between hiding behind his shield and whanging it at enemies if they stop paying attention to him for a second.
The pace of new content seems strong too, the first two new characters are coming out on January 10 and will give us half of the Fantastic Four, with Reed Richards and Sue Storm joining the game. In a few weeks we'll get the other two members, The Thing and the Human Torch. Expect this pace to continue while the player base is energised.
I adore the destructible scenery, with big chunks of each map able to be destroyed with gunfire and explosions. This can be used to wipe out sniper positions or just to blow a wall down so players can path back towards the frontline as fast as possible.
Destructible scenery seemed like it was going to be a big thing back around the Bad Company 2 days. When that game launched in 2010 you could basically blow apart most buildings down to the girders, and then this grew in interesting ways until in Battlefield 4 when you could demolish an entire skyscraper in the name of, er, Levolution. However, handcrafted levels without destruction seem to have become the norm now, so it's exciting to see the destruction in Marvel Rivals, even if it repairs itself over time.
I'm less keen on the maps that change and warp around you – the black symbiote goo on Klyntar shifts with each map in a pattern I haven't yet gotten my head around. I'm told (by PC Gamer news legend and Diamond-level Marvel Rivals player Elie Gould) that there's a pattern, but I mostly bounce around on the goop and then get killed and venture my way through it all over again.
I don't think I'll put too much more time into Marvel Rivals, but there's no denying that it's not going away any time soon. With growing distaste for Overwatch 2 among the fanbase, it seems like Marvel Rivals has stolen away a lot of that audience.
As a result, despite the fact it's not really for me, I'll be keeping a close eye on things. It's guaranteed to be one of the biggest live game shooters of 2025, and any changes it makes will likely ripple out throughout the genre over the next few years.
Gibs
- Tarkov's got a Christmas event running. I was going to write about that this week but honestly just… look at this Coca-Cola lorry. That's how you know it's Christmas. Props to Battlestate Games for shamelessly ripping it off. Otherwise, there's big snow drifts and it's just a really pretty time to hunt enemy players in the wilderness.
- Nvidia's new line of graphics cards have been unveiled, and look pretty decent. Will wait for proper testing and I'm not due an upgrade this year, but if the price/performance is in line with what Nvidia is suggesting, it could be a great opportunity to jump onto RTX for people who haven't yet made the jump.
- Still sluggish with work this week? This Doechii Tiny Desk concert will wake you up.