See San Francisco fall as Marvel's Avengers assembles some footage
Heroes to zeros
Marvel’s Avengers is a rare-earth neodymium snark magnet. It’s based on the most recognisable heroes on Earth, but starring what looks like their stunt-doubles. Though it meant Nate got to do this, it’s also made everyone a bit wary of what’s coming down our game tubes.
I imagine that Crystal Dynamics felt the best way to get ahead of that is let everyone take an extensive look at the game, which we have below. It’s splashy, swoopy, and restless, but it also adds another element of questionable authenticity: the quips are bloody awful.
Turn down your speakers.
The game has one decent hook: you get to experience those Avengers-level boshes from multiple perspectives. At the centre of this one, a prologue to the game during A-Day (a day lauding the team), is the destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge. With the Avengers in attendance, each member of the team gets a few sequences to themselves. There’s some smoke and mirrors in all this, as there are a fair few fights that are just circling enemies with telegraphed attacks, but the team does have their own powers to deploy that fit the movie action, and where they couldn’t make Thor look like Thor, they at least polished up his hammer. There’s a decent amount of variety between characters on the ground, so Hulk does Hulk smashing across the broken landmark, Cap tosses his shield like a homing drone, Iron Man blasts, and Black Widow dodges and kicks.
But they don’t shut up, and a lot of it is terrible. At one point Taskmaster, the villain, shouts to Black Widow: “As one former-Shield agent to another: keep up!” It barely makes sense. A line or two raised a chuckle, but most of it made me want to hold my cat over my head to drown out the sound. It's a shame, as the overall vavoom is spectacular. I like seeing big things fall down, and exploding ships, and they pulled that stuff off.
With promised free add-ons to bulk out the superhero fun, and co-op, it at least looks like quite a package is planned for May 15 next year.