The Most Disappointing Video Game of 2020
The Most Disappointing Game of 2020
Top 10 Video Game Easter Eggs of 2020
Well, 2020 has had a heck of a lot of downs, but there have been a lot of games that kept our spirits up. And then, there are the games that promised us great experiences only to get lazy enough to trip at the finish line. Recently, we put our list of the Top 10 Most Disappointing Games of 2020, and unsurprisingly, “Marvel’s Avengers” took the top spot. If you’d like to know what the other nine were, be sure to check out the list afterwards. For now, welcome to MojoPlays, and today, we’re taking a look at the Most Disappointing Game of 2020 - “Marvel’s Avengers”. How is it that a game with the Avengers IP attached deliver such an underwhelming experience in the most frustrating way possible? Well, there are a handful of factors that contributed to its lackluster quality. Buckle in because this may get messy. Let’s start off with the most glaring issue of the game - it’s a live service. *ahem* Excuse me - in the words of combat designer Vincent Napoli, it’s a “narrative-focused” live service. In other words, it’s another game that’s launching in an already-congested market and aims to “keep players coming back”, as we’ve heard from several publishers trying to ride the live service train. With a phrase like that, you’re already setting customers up for disappointment. You mean to tell us you don’t plan on ever letting this story end? There are hundreds, if not thousands, of online games demanding our attention everyday. With the Avengers name slapped on it, one would hope this would be one of the most thrilling games ever. And that leads us into the second problem - uninspired gameplay. For a game that’s about letting you wield the powers of several different heroes, it doesn’t really do anything interesting with them. It quickly devolves into spamming the same basic attacks and using abilities whenever the cooldowns are done. Some heroes even play similar to one another like Hulk and Kamala Khan. Hulk can get angry to deal more damage while Kamala can grow a few feet taller to deal more damage. When you aren’t in combat, most of your time is spent running around and opening an obscene amount of chests. Because that’s what heroes do! It would have been nice if we could have at least played through the tedious gameplay at a decent performance level, but you’d have a better chance asking Tony Stark to keep quiet for five minutes. “Avengers” was riddled with so many bugs at launch that it made the game almost unbearable to play. It wasn’t uncommon to see characters phasing through each other in the middle of cutscenes. PC players, on the other hand, got the worst of it as they noticed the game utilizing most of their hardware’s CPU while failing to deliver a smooth performance. One would assume a good amount of time and money was spent to make sure the game ran properly. Alas, the ludicrous amount of product placement tells us otherwise. Yes, because we aren’t advertised to enough in this day and age! Thanks to deals with Verizon and Virgin Media, the Avengers can now become walking ads while they’re beating up robots, opening chests, and beating up more robots. To make matters worse, additional content has been locked behind packages of Take 5 gum. Yeah, there’s quite a bit of cross-promotion that’s soiling the experience. Some may be more forgiving of “Avengers” for its single-player story, but none of us at MojoPlays could see why the story received any praise. As if it wasn’t uncharacteristically annoying to see the “Avengers” so bummed out, Kamala Khan was severely misused and quickly became the most annoying character in the game. Throughout the game, Kamala lacks any real character growth and is so easily amazed by the most mundane things that it turns her into more of an excitable tour guide trying to distract us from the game’s flaws. “Look at this! WOW!! So cool!” Yeah, fine, whatever - when can we go back to smashing things as Hulk? Not even Spider-Man could have saved this game, and he’s not even in the game...yet. Although, Spidey won’t even be in the game unless you’re playing on PlayStation 4 or 5. It’s understandable for game companies to have exclusivity deals, but for a character as big as Spider-Man locked behind one specific platform? You may as well have told Xbox and PC users that their copies would feature less content. It certainly doesn’t help that Crystal Dynamics responded to complaints with “...for those players who absolutely want to play as Spider-Man, you have the option to do so on PlayStation.” While the studio has pointed fingers towards Sony’s relationship with the “Spider-Man” franchise, this was not the way to handle the backlash. The last massive dilemma with “Avengers” was how it employed a confuse-opoly method with its currencies. There are a total of ELEVEN currencies to keep track of in this game! And if you aren’t getting a headache from dealing with that, you’ll surely get a migraine from the greedy monetization on display. If you’re looking to grab additional skins and gear for your heroes, you’ll have to fork over even MORE money for this sixty-dollar game as each character has their own battle pass system that costs ten bucks. With there only being six playable characters in the base game, you’re basically paying $120 minimum for “Marvel’s Avengers” and its content. What hurts more about “Avengers’” abysmal quality is how superhero games have already been enjoying a rise in popularity. The “Batman: Arkham” franchise defied expectations with its world, story, and combat. Insomniac’s “Spider-Man” game presented a new and unique take on the webslinger, his allies, and his foes. And before either of those games, a wealth of superhero games had adopted standard mechanics and formulas but captured our attention in how they utilized the source material. How many of us got a kick out of “Marvel Heroes”, the “X-Men” arcade game, or “Marvel Ultimate Alliance”? “Avengers” could have easily settled on a simple concept rather than try to be another live service. It could have been literally any other kind of game! When “Marvel’s Avengers” was announced in early 2017, we were ready for a superhero game that was going to learn from previous superhero games and was going to be a true love letter to Marvel’s greatest superhero team. This game should have been as ambitious and game changing as the 2012 “Avengers” movie. Instead, what we got was a product that demanded too much of our time and too much money. Since launch, the game has lost at least 96% of its playerbase, and Square Enix reported a loss of more than $60 million. With Crystal Dynamics having delayed DLC and scrambling to get the game in a more stable condition, who can say if this game will live again? “Avengers” has lost Square Enix too much money, and by this point, so many players have left that those remaining are actually having difficulty finding matches. Looks like A-Day was something to have occurred both in and out of the game, and that is why “Marvel’s Avengers” is the Most Disappointing Game of 2020.
