A few weeks back, I got around to playing Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy.  It was pretty good, and went a long way towards helping me forget how little fun I had with the Avengers game that had come out the year before.  Honestly, it was the most fun I’d had with a Marvel property since… when did No Way Home come out? Right after Endgame, so like 2019?  OK, 2019.  Maybe early 2020?  I’m not going to google it.

Regardless, I didn’t go into Marvel Rivals with any great expectations.  I was seeing a few people rave about it in a Discord I follow, but even the most vocal fans were admitting that it was pretty much an Overwatch clone with Marvel skins, and I thought I was completely DONE with Overwatch.  I used to play quite a lot of it, until Overwatch 2 came out, and I played exactly 2 games of Overwatch 2 and put down the controller for good.

It turns out that I wasn’t actually done with Overwatch, per se, or at least that I’m not done with NetEase’s take on the idea, because this thing is an absolute blast.  You have the same basic idea of having two teams of colorful characters that can be slotted into tank/dps/healer roles, simple objectives (move something from point A to point B sometimes, King of the Hill other times), and then everything in the middle is more or less chaos.

Oh, one other similarity to Overwatch.  I bought THAT game because I heard you could play as a moon hamster, then wound up playing Mercy almost every time.  Likewise, I downloaded this one because I heard that Squirrel Girl was a character and I have spent 100% of my time playing characters who are Not Squirrel Girl.

Well, let’s be even more specific.  I got to the character select menu and discovered this:

If you had the ability to go back to the mid 1980s and spy on me as a nerdy teenage lad, you would see that I was a big fan of Cloak & Dagger, a pair of superheroes that were… well, a super angsty duo with an origin story that pretty much comes across as a Say No To Drugs PSA.  But I was a simple teenager, the angst was a selling point, and I never expected to see them as playable characters in a game because honestly I figured Marvel had tossed them on the “not X-men, not Avengers, nobody cares” pile.

So the deal with this character duo in game is that Dagger is a healer, Cloak is a DPS, you can switch between the two of them with a button press and really it’s kind of like Mercy again where you had to swap between her staff and her pistol depending on your mood and whether your DPS players had completely abdicated their simple job of PEELING OFF YOUR D**M HEALER I’M BACK HERE GETTING MURDERED or not.

I’m not bitter.

So, honestly I can’t be objective about the game past this point.  It taps right into that nostalgia from my formative years and really it could be awful and I would still try to find good things to say about it.  I don’t THINK it’s awful, though.

As you might gather from the idea that they were able to find spots in the roster for a pair of, objectively, D-list heroes from the mid-80s, the range of playable characters is huge.  There’s over 30 of them, ranging from your obvious Hulk and Spider-hyphen-Man to ice-skating K-pop singers and an unbearably cute shark/dog THING named Jeff, and the size of the roster means that there is a lot of variety in the teams you see.

My one. Singular. SINGULAR complaint about the hero selection is that there really isn’t a “cute” tank.  So I’m not likely to try out the role any time soon, even if I do eventually get tired of Ty & Tandy.

I don’t think that will be terribly soon, though, because one thing Marvel Rivals does that is objectively better than Overwatch is that it gives lots of positive feedback to you if you’re healing.

Like, in hundreds of games played as Mercy, I got one (1) PLAY OF THE GAME moment with her.  That post-match spotlight was almost universally reserved for “oh, look. The Hanzo main pushed his Ultimate ability at a good time to kill four people”.  Sometimes tanks got it.  Healers pretty much did not, except occasionally Moira but even he/she/it usually got it as a reward for pushing the “ULT NOW” button and killing a lot of people.

I get it, there’s really no WOW factor to a clutch rez or to keeping a team vertical while the other guys are trying to convert them to horizontal.  I thought I was OK with it.

In just over 60 games of Marvel Rivals, I have gotten this screen four times:

And it’s a good feeling every time.

Healers also get nice little callouts on the post-game screen where you get to see your heal numbers and shiny little icons for the best healing and most assists.  I’m not always the top of either category, but even when I’m not I enjoy seeing the virtual thumbs-up.

I say that even IF it’s for the healer on the other team, and ESPECIALLY if it’s for the healer on the other team and they lost because they got stuck with a bunch of muttonheads.  I have had matches where I look at the post-game summary and I just want to send the opposing healer a big internet hug because they did everything possible to avoid the L but couldn’t.

That’s AFTER the match, of course.  DURING the match, getting a moment alone with an opposing healer mid-match is almost always going to result in me pushing the “Cloak now” button and trying very hard to send them back to their spawn point.

So.  Teenage nostalgia + actually respecting healers.  That’s a difficult to resist combo, and makes it even more difficult to be objective, so let’s get past me raving about this and move on to some other thoughts.  Specifically, the question of how they are paying for this thing.

Like, I play (too many) Asian gacha games, and their business model is pretty obvious.  Insert money, hope you get your particular flavor of waifu or husbando, occasionally lie to your friends about how you are 100% free to play and have NO IDEA how all these SSRs have just fallen into your account.

Marvel Rivals lets you play any character you want, from the moment you launch the game, with no strings attached as far as I can tell.  There are some cosmetic outfits you can buy, but the basic versions of every character are, well, already very good looking.  Like, aren’t the free characters supposed to be super plain and the thirsty versions locked behind a paywall?  Like, what is this madness?  I’m sure some people are going to drop the 15 or 20 bucks* on a skin for their favorite, but is it really enough?

Well, I guess… hopefully?  Like, I want to keep playing this.  So, you should all buy plenty of skins.  I will be over here, admiring your impeccable drip.

* I don’t actually know how much skins cost.  One thing this DOES take from the Gacha model is that you buy the skins with a currency that is itself exchanged for another currency, and THAT currency is the one you pay real life money for.  So while I THINK a “1600 currency” skin is probably around 20 bucks, I’m not sure.  They potentially could be dramatically cheaper or more expensive.