If you took a Diablo-style game, made it a free-to-play MMO and then skinned it with the Marvel Universe, what you’d end up with is Marvel Heroes, Gazillion Entertainment’s foray into the F2P market.
Marvel Heroes had an open Beta weekend on Steam these past few days, and despite a few problems with connecting to the game servers and some interesting bugs, I had a great time. The game allows you to pick one of the Avengers to start (the movie line-up, not the current comic book roster) and Gazillion kindly gives you a couple thousand credits of in-game currency to buy another hero or one of the many alternate costumes for sale.
I ended up picking Iron Man as my avatar and I found that the game has a nice difficulty progression to complement the array of cool powers that become available to you. Once my friends were able to connect we ended up romping around for a couple hours tackling quests that had us fighting a host of Marvel super-villains from the infamous (Doctor Octopus) to the obscure (Grim Reaper). The individual loot spawns fairly frequently and more often than not I was looking at an upgrade. In a new twist on selling trash to a vendor, you can give shop NPCs your unwanted gear instead of selling it, allowing them to “level up” and carry better gear.
It did get a little confusing with all the very similar-looking heroes running around, as I ended up following a group of people playing as Deadpool, Thor and Captain America while my friends playing the exact same heroes were on the other side of the map. Once people are able to acquire different costumes, I imagine this will be a rare occurrence. There are also a couple bugs that hampered my time with the game, such as when I kept taking damage after I had beaten a boss and had to let myself die, or the few times my inventory temporarily disappeared.
This is a Beta, however, so those things are to be expected. Hopefully Gazillion gets these errors ironed out before the June 4 launch, because I am totally on-board. The Beta has been extended to tomorrow morning if anyone wants to try it out after reading this. Did anyone else get in on the Beta weekend for Marvel Heroes? What did you think?
I wanna play….
My friends have been playing it, but I haven’t bothered yet. Can anyone convince me why I should try it out?
It’s free, seems like it will run on a variety of machines, and it’s pretty fun to boot.
If you’re also invested in the Marvel universe on any level, there’s that benefit as well. Me, I just know that this is as close as we’re going to get to Ultimate Alliance 3.
I’ve gotten more and more invested in the Marvel universe lately, and your write up has me intrigued, Mitch. Wasn’t on my radar before but now I’ll probably give it a shot.
Yeah, Marvel NOW! has been clicking with me outside of a couple missteps (Savage Wolverine). In the wake of The Avengers and all these people jumping on-board, they’ve done a good job of making all these comics with 40+ years of back-story easy to get into.