(Image courtesy of SteamDB.) “Marvel Rivals is a 6v6 ‘hero shooter’ featuring iconic Marvel characters.”

Jesse Nguyen
Connector Editor

With 444,286 Steam players on its first day of release, “Marvel Rivals” is a third-person hero shooter video game developed and published by NetEase games alongside Marvel Games. It was released on Dec. 6, 2024, for Windows, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and is free-to-play with only cosmetic items being purchasable.

A much-welcomed feature of “Marvel Rivals” is the fact that every playable character is ready to play at launch. Many free-to-play hero shooters often have characters locked behind extensive hours of progression and micro-transactions, which thankfully is not the case in “Marvel Rivals.” For how high-quality character designs are, this is an impressive and welcome change to the hero shooter format. While cosmetic skins look fantastic, the base character designs are so solid that there is not a huge gap in artistic quality between the two.

A big appeal of “Marvel Rivals” is the Marvel IP attached to it and seeing beloved characters come to life. The character designs are stellar. Every character is reimagined with so much nuance and love, it feels fantastic. Characters have unique abilities too, even though some character kits feel bloated and over-tuned. “Marvel Rivals” has a lot of variety in terms of character ability, where each character gets a different number of abilities. For instance, Luna Snow has 4 abilities, an ultimate and 2 passives, while Moon Knight has 7 abilities, an ultimate and no passive. Though it leads to a unique identity for each character, balancing can become a big issue which is apparent for some characters on release.

In terms of gameplay, “Marvel Rivals” is fun and exciting. Matches differ greatly from one another, thanks to the vast character selection. A unique feature to “Marvel Rivals” is the team up abilities, unique abilities activated if you have specific characters in the same team. Some team up abilities can largely be ignored, but some are game changing, like Hela resurrecting either Thor or Loki after she lands a final blow. The destructible environment feature also adds a layer of complexity moment to moment but is optional if players want to engage with it or not. In terms of gunplay however, there is a certain lack of weight and meaning behind the player’s actions.

The game operates under a class system which characters are based around. These are Vanguard (tanks), duelist (traditional damage dealers), and strategist, (healers and supporters). Playing without at least one or two of these on the team feels very detrimental, and there is currently no role queue option. So, it’s entirely possible to get a team with only damage dealers with no tank or healer. Characters fit their archetype well for the most part. The game runs with a fairly fast time to kill (TTK) and healing system, so gameplay does not feel like shooting bullets into a sponge.

The most glaring issue with “Marvel Rivals” unfortunately has to be its performance on PC. On low-mid end graphics cards, players can expect between 30-50 FPS with drops all the way down to 20 when playing with low settings. On high end graphics cards, players can expect an unstable 60 FPS when playing with medium to high settings. Regardless, for how stylized its art style is, it is simply too graphically demanding, especially for a hero shooter. Online multiplayer games need to have stable and high performance, as milliseconds can be the difference between life and death. Team fights were especially bad in terms of performance drops, with the game being borderline unplayable at times. Compared to other hero shooters, which are designed and optimized to be high performance, “Marvel Rivals” definitely needs a performance patch if it wants to stand the test of time. For how much action goes on at a given time, 100+ FPS should be easily achievable for any decent PC rig.

Though players can sacrifice image quality for higher FPS, the game’s visuals tank a lot. Image quality becomes blurry and grainy, and characters lose extradentary amounts of detail. The default graphics settings are quite bad too, and players should definitely tweak them extensively for an optimal experience. It is somewhat humorous though how some character abilities, like Dr. Strange’s portal, have the unique property of tanking everyone’s FPS.

Overall, while “Marvel Rivals” is a fun and chaotic experience, its lack of polish and performance issues really bring it down. As a day one review, this is expected, it’s just a matter of hoping the developers work on improving the game in the right places.

Grade: B-