It’s taking elements from Marvel Ultimate Alliance, Destiny and even Anthem (the good parts).
What I think Avengers does best, at least from this limited test, is its character kits. This game has a very tricky line to walk. It’s a superhero game, so everyone is going to be comparing it to classics like Arkham or Spider-Man. The problem? It has six different heroes at launch and at least three more coming soon after. By default, that means combat almost cannot be as polished as those games since there are so many characters we’re splitting time between.
All characters share a certain base, light attacks and heavy attacks and usually some sort of dodge/parry combo. Holding L2 will aim, hitting R2 will fire…something, depending on who you are. That could be guns for Black Widow, rockets or lasers for Iron Man, stretchy arms for Ms. Marvel and even the Hulk has a projectile, where he rips a chunk of earth out of the ground and throws it at enemies.
Black Widows is, of course, an assassin, and spends her time zipping around with a grappling hook, firing her guns and using shock weapons to stun enemies and set up takedown executions.
Hulk is a brute force of nature who can pick up enemies and slam them into other enemies, and has to manage an intrinsic “rage” meter that when activated, gives him armor and heals him, as he’s always absorbing a ton of damage.
Ms. Marvel is the most ground focused with her stretchy arm and leg combos, and dealt the most brawler damage of the bunch, with my loadout. Her “ultimate” move (all characters have one) has her going supersized which is both hilarious and extremely effective against enemies as she deals massive damage in that form.
Iron Man is…an Anthem javelin. I’m not kidding. Crystal Dynamics has smartly stolen more or less the exact flight control scheme from Anthem and ditched the fuel meter so you can just fly around shooting off rockets, lasers and repulsor blasts while barrel rolling away from missiles.
Combat is very arcadey. Don’t go into this expecting Arkham or Tsushima. This is a brawler, especially since you’re almost always in a team of four, and things get wildly chaotic. You can dodge and block but you will also be just mashing your way through things a lot. It’s fun, and may get more technical at higher levels, but just manage your expectations. Again, think more Ultimate Alliance.
I was mixed on my AI teammates. In open combat, they were competent, and geared with the stuff I had grinded for them, they were able to do significant damage on their own. The problem, however, is that’s pretty much all they can do. They just don’t recognize objectives at all. Like if I’m in a room where it’s required that we stand on three plates to charge up something, I will have to run around to all three plates myself while they just fight random enemies in the middle. They will not destroy things that need to be destroyed as an objective most of the time. They have a weird aversion to turrets where I constantly found myself needing to go around killing 8 lofted turrets or so before every encounter since they wouldn’t bother with them otherwise.
Finally, I just didn’t figure out a way to make them do anything. For instance, in one mission there’s a chest behind a door that can only be smashed by a brawler like Hulk. As Black Widow, I literally could not get through it, but I also could not figure out how to issue a simple command to AI Hulk like “smash that door.” Kind of a big no-no for anything squad based.
Loot does a few different things, like increases your stats that do different forms of damage. For instance, I could get a lot of “Might” heavy gear, which would make my Black Widow a great brawler. But if I got “Ranged” gear instead, I am likely better off picking off targets with my high caliber pistol from a distance.
Past that, there are other modifiers that do a variety of things in combat. There are some forms of bonus damage you might unlock at the tail end of a combo (Pym Particles, Cosmic and Gamma damage standing in for Fire, Electric, Corrosive, etc). You might boost the cooldown of one of your three special skills (which have very long cooldowns without any boosts, similar to Destiny).
The problem with loot? This might be the only looter I’ve ever seen where nothing about any of the loot has a physical appearance in the game. Diablo and Destiny and Division armor and weapons all show up in-game as physical objects. Anthem has a “component” system which makes armor pieces cosmetic, but it does still have physical weapons.
Avengers has none of that. There are four gear slots and three artifact slots, but your characters appearance will always be determined by a cosmetic skin, similar to Fortnite.
Finally, what I would consider the worst aspect of the beta and something that does have me somewhat concerned about the finale game is how copy and pasted so much of it felt. I am sure that there will be more highly individualized action sequences like the Golden Gate Bridge opener, and yet for most of the missions in the beta, it felt like we were going through the same sets of 6-8 different hallways and ending up in the same 6-8 different rooms. Some activities, the smaller ones called “Drop Zones” were often little more than two hallways and a single room of enemies, like some sort of dressed up challenge room. But there are also literal challenge rooms too, HARM simulators that take place in blank virtual spaces.
But the problem was that even many of the larger missions still felt like a ton of elements were repeating themselves, both visually and gameplay wise. The same locked doors with one of two ways to open them. The same rooms where you stand on plates or destroy servers or reactor parts. A few of these had very slim story elements, but even the “grand finale” activity of the beta, the villain lair, was more or less just a longer version of what had come before, plus a somewhat complicated end boss.