Marvel Heroes

[Scipio]

It's an open beta weekend.  Pretty decent game; lots of fan service, and generally quite playable.  It suffers from a lot of F2P disease, though.

[Syt]

The feedback I've read so far seems to indicate that it's rather bland for an action RPG, and that they're really nickel & diming it for costumes characters etc. I think I'll rather wait for LEGO Marvel.

[DontSayBanana]

The feedback I've read so far seems to indicate that it's rather bland for an action RPG, and that they're really nickel & diming it for costumes characters etc. I think I'll rather wait for LEGO Marvel.

Now that one I had a pre-order for about three days after the formal announcement.

[katmai]

Played it a few weeks back. Meh 20+ of Spider-Man, Wolverines, and Storms  wandering around in addition to being a Diablo clone make it a pass for me.

[Syt]

Excerpt from RPS:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/06/06/a-few-more-hours-with-marvel-heroes/

For our review, creators Gazillion gave us 10,000 in game "G". So yes, this article is entirely bought. And that's actually a ludicrous amount of pretend money – to buy it would cost around $90. Which puts my spree into some perspective. Having paid 2000G for Spider-Man as a playable character, 1200 to stop Hawkeye looking like a complete idiot, and 1250 for a pet dinosaur, were I just some awful ordinary member of the public like you, that would have set me back over $40. Utterly ludicrous. What feel like nothingy trinkets – a different character to play as, a pet of dubious worth – possibly purely decorative, and some pretend clothes, costing more than a new copy of Torchlight 2 or Van Helsing.

It's important to note that the game certainly has improved since the beta. Not only that it no longer looks like it was made for Amiga, but the dreadful animations have been fixed, and the sprawling locations seem to me to be a lot smaller. But what I couldn't tell in the barren beta servers was just how much the enforced multiplayer was going to spoil just about everything.

Imagine you're playing Titan Quest, Diablo II, or whatever your preferred ARPG might be. You're soloing at the moment, and you're in a brand new location. What's the feeling? If you're like me, it's one of buzzing with potential. You're going to encounter new enemies, likely find better loot, and tick off a bunch more missions from your list. The map's all greyed out, and the territory is yours to explore! Now imagine that with your first footstep you encounter seven other players fighting all the enemies just ahead of you. Half of which are wearing the same costume as you.

That's the Marvel Heroes experience. It's not designed to play like an MMO, where aggroed enemies will focus on the players who bothered them. Instead it's a giant free-for-all, where everyone else is there to spoil any fun you might be having. For one blessed moment I found a stretch of snake-filled sand where there was no one else around, and finally found myself facing a half-decent challenge. At last there were more than just three enemies attacking at once, and I was having to do more than point the cursor. And then two Daredevils turned up and starting killing them too. And I was back to being bored. It's like when you're playing an MMO, happily dealing with a mob, and then some other player swoops in and "helps", and you think, "Gee, thanks you, but I was fine." Except, for the whole game. And you're doing it just as much as anyone else, or you wouldn't have anything to do at all.

[Grey Fox]

That Van Helsing game is apparently pretty good.

[crazy canuck]

Its why I liked Path of Exiles - if you solo nobody is there to ruin your game. Everything is instanced.