Between the brilliant TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind, retro beat-‘em-ups are enjoying a bit of renaissance.
Marvel Cosmic Invasion is perhaps the highest profile effort yet, a sublimely presented four-player pixel art tribute to the arcade glory years, when smoky pool halls were ruled by the likes of Capcom’s The Punisher and, perhaps more pertinently here, Konami’s X-Men.
In that sense, this outing harbors few surprises: you select from a roster of 15 superheroes and punch your way through 15 stages, each inspired by locations from across the larger Marvel Universe.
Your ultimate objective? To take down insectoid Annihilus and his Cosmic Control Rod, in a plot that’s partly based on the Annihilation Wave storyline from the comic books.
While the gameplay remains fairly familiar for the genre, its biggest twist is how it requires each player to select two superheroes, adding tag mechanics to the traditional button mashing mix.
You can toggle freely between your characters at any time, or trigger team-ups which allow you to really lay the smackdown on your foes. This means, in a full four-player setup, there can be as many as eight superheroes on the screen.
To support this, dev Tribute Games has prepared a fairly stacked launch day roster, which blends familiar faces like Spider-Man and Wolverine with lesser-known additions like Beta-Ray Bill and Cosmic Ghost Rider.
While all of the characters ultimately have access to the same basic set of abilities, they handle pretty differently.
She-Hulk is slower and more powerful than some of her peers, for example, while Storm and Silver Surfer have more potent aerial abilities.
Each character has his or her own special moves, like Black Panther who can lob Vibranium spears at his opponents or Rocket Raccoon who wields an arsenal of explosives.
You also build up Focus through landing attacks, which allows you to trigger a screen-clearing super move. Again, each of these is unique, like Captain America throwing his shield in a 360-degree circle or Phoenix filling the screen with flames.
The animation work on some of the characters is exceptional, with Venom’s symbiote transformations particularly standing out, occasionally revealing a glimpse of conduit Eddie Brock behind his suit.
And many of the levels are filled with Easter Eggs, whether it’s New York City and its various references to the Daily Bugle or the Savage Land with its pre-historic backdrops.
We don’t want to spoil too much, but this is a whistle-stop tour through the Marvel universe, and there are some brilliant cameos which even the most casual of fans will appreciate.
While the game is perfectly enjoyable in single player, it is built around online and local multiplayer first and foremost. Fortunately, in all formats it’s a drop-in/drop-out experience, so your friends and family can dip in and out as they please.
Playing in a pre-release environment we haven’t been able to test out the online just yet, but we did spend time in local co-op and found the action more intense and over-the-top in this format.
There are definite difficulty spikes in single player which you should be aware of, and while they’re not insurmountable, the whole game becomes much more manageable when you’ve got two or three partners by your side.
We should also mention that you will also level up your superheroes the more you use them in the main campaign mode, and this adds additional HP and various other abilities and passives to their arsenal.
In some instances, we found we were being punished for experimenting with new characters we hadn’t levelled up, but the game absolutely encourages replayability and its difficulty isn’t so high that you can’t beat levels with superheroes you’ve never tried before.
Our biggest criticism of the game is how depth perception – a common issue for side-scrolling brawlers – is made more difficult by the increased emphasis on enemies who can fly here.
Without referring to shadows – which can be difficult to pay attention to given the chaotic nature of what’s happening on the screen – we often found we would whiff on aerial attacks because we were either too shallow or deep into the stage.
It’s not a major issue, but it can become frustrating when you air ball an enemy you thought you were perfectly lined up alongside, and it happened to us a lot across almost all of the game’s stages.
Still, it’ll take you roughly three hours to beat the campaign on your first playthrough, but you are encouraged to replay all of the levels to fulfil challenge requirements which encourage you to use specific characters or play in a particular way.
Once you’ve done this, you can invest any resources you’ve earned into the NAME HERE to unlock various character bios, color palette swaps, and even arcade modifiers.
And yes, the latter pertains to a more traditional arcade mode, which actually condenses the runtime and sees you selecting between stages at key moments on your path towards the final face off with Annihilus.
Conclusion
Marvel Cosmic Invasion does little to surprise, but it executes excellently on its retro beat-‘em-up ambitions. Depth perception can be a problem, but we like how the tag-team format gives the game a bit more of a chaotic feel, especially during local and online co-op sessions. And we also appreciate how each superhero handles slightly differently, adding a lot of replay value to a brawler that already has a relatively robust content offering.
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