Marvel's Avengers

Marvel's Avengers' campaign is fun and endearing, but the loot-based post-game meant to be the meat of this meal is unrewarding and overly repetitive.

Avengers feels like two separate games smashed together, and while they don't always sync up, both parts are linked by deep, intelligent combat spread across varied heroes.

A likeable campaign can't make up for unexciting design.

A well-told campaign and story do their best to mask a rather scrawny service game beneath.

OK multiplayer stitched onto a great campaign

A snappy, fun campaign full of great VO ends too soon, and the game-as-service that comes after is paper thin

The amount of depth can be confusing at first, but you have plenty of reasons to keep playing in the endgame

When Avengers isn't getting in the way of itself with its tacked-on campaign, it's a bit of silly arcade fun. If a lot of these concerns are answered via post-launch patches and the DLC characters are fun to play, there's plenty of room for improvement with Avengers. At launch, it's not going to wow everyone. Maybe Marvel wanted this out as soon as possible, but it could have used another delay.

Marvel’s Avengers isn’t the best comic book game out there, but it’s certainly the best team-based comic book game I’ve played. It’s not simply that it gathers iconic heroes together and lets me become them, but that each one of them is equally enjoyable.

There will be case studies written about this release in the years to come, because it should have been a sure-fire slam dunk, and yet it feels like a missed opportunity. Make no mistake, the title has got better – and with the announcement of Black Panther, developer Crystal Dynamics remains committed to iterating on it for the foreseeable future – but as we alluded to in our Marvel’s Avengers PS4 review, there’s a disconnect between the promise of this product and what it actually offers right now.