Given how dominant Marvel has been at the movies for the past 15 years, it's surprising how few of its big-budget games have found similar success. Recently, Marvel scooper that the company is "painfully aware" of its games' failure to reach their potential, and has plans to put a🌌 gr𒀰eater focus on interactive experiences going forward.
But, looking back on its releases, it's strange how poorly some of them have done. There have been big success stories, like Insomniac's 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man games. It's incredibly likely 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man 2 will continue that success, and Insomniac's track record bodes well for the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Wolverine game it also has in the works. But, unlike 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Star Wars in its decade of EA exclusivity, there’s no limit on which🐻 developers can get a Marvel𒁃 license.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网: I’m Ready Foꦆr Coz🔯y Spider-Man Fall
Insomniac's ꦜsuperhero games have become an autumn tradition like Gilmore Girls rewatches and pumpkin spice lattes.
That’s led to some cool games in a variety of genres, many of which I’ve liked to varying degrees. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Marvel’s Avengers was the most flawed, and didn’t fully play to Crystal Dynamics’ stren𓆏gths as a developer of cinematic third-person action-adventure games, but was still a solid six out of ten. It made the mistake of building a game around the loop of collecting new pairs of slightly stronger trousers for the Hulk, but the campaign interspersed throughout the live service bullshit was pretty fun.
Eidos-Montreal got to make the purer version of that kind of game with Marvel’s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Guardians of the Galaxy, a single-player third-person narrative action game with no live service hooks, no online play, and no monetization scheme outside of purchasing the game for $60. It was surprisingly great, offering a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mass Effect-lite space adventure. The dialogue did▨n’t always work, but the overarching story was interesting and many of the character moments landed. It also had a ton of great environmental design, like the goopy glory of the Quarantine Zone, a🌟nd the cyberpunk appeal of Nowhere.
My personal favorite, though, is Marvel's 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Midnight Suns, which I've written about on more than one occasion. From Firaxis Games, the studio behind the XCOM series, Midnight Suns is a tactical RPG that combines the turn-based combat Firaxis is known for with some of Marvel's most iconic heroes, allowing you to build (platonic) relationships with characters like Spider-Man, Wolverine, Captain Marvel, Iron Man, Captain America, Blade, and more. I wrote recently about how unfair it was that it didn't get its due, but it feels like a symbol of Marvel's broader failure to find an audience for games that should be extremely easy to market.
A triple-A game being very good and in a popular genre is usually enough to give it some momentum. Live games, single-player action-adventures, and tactical RPGs are all, to varying degrees, popular. Pair those genres with one of the biggest brands in the world and these games should have been commercial slam dunks. Why weren't they?
The answer is most straightforward for Avengers, which was attempting to infiltrate a crowded market, and got reviews that generally could be summed up as, "It's better than you might expect." That kind of shrug isn't enough to get a live service game off the ground in the space that's already dominated by 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Destiny 2, Fortnite, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Apex Legends, and others.
But why did Guardians of the Galaxy and Midnight Suns have such a hard time breaking through? There are possible explanations for each. Both launched multiple years after Avengers: Endgame, which served as a jumping off point for many of the franchise's more casual fans. Throw in the MCU's oversaturation across movies and TV and there's less of a interest for more — as evidenced by the series' diminishing box office returns. Midnight Suns also launched in December, which led to it being overlooked for awards consideration.
Whatever the reasons, it's a bummer to see these good games brought down by the franchise's fading fortunes. All three are worth playing (again, to varying degrees) so it sucks that they didn't find much of an audience. And it sucks worse that the clock ticked down for Marvel's Avengers without it finding some sort of redemption. The Crystal Dynamics game had its servers shut off earlier this year, and more recently, was delisted entirely. Even if you wanted to buy it now, you can't. Here's hoping Midnight Suns and Guardians of the Galaxy can, at least, avoid that fate.