Faced with a dubious audience to say the least after its video appearances over the months, the Marvel’s Avengers imagined by Crystal Dynamics is finally revealed in a beta throughout the month. It is first available for pre-orders before gradually extending to everyone, depending on the platform, on the weekends of August 14 and 16 then August 21 and 23. In the meantime, we were able to try it out for a weekend on its PlayStation 4 closed beta to offer you this preview.
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Once upon a time, the Avengers
—Promotion Marvel’s Avengers has not been easy: a few weeks before its release, the game has a lot of trouble to convince after many cinematic trailers and sequences of” title=”
Gameplay
English term difficult to translate designating both the set of rules governing the game and the enjoyment of the game. An MMOG with innovative gameplay will offer a unique gaming experience to the player. Likewise, a game that claims “good gameplay” will be fun and engaging.
“>gameplay which have cooled more than one. But with an extremely strong license, the multiplayer “service game” has a part to play. We feel it from the first moments of a beta rather poor in scripted content, preferring to tell us its game systems rather than its history. However, if you’re curious and haven’t already seen the trailers that tell the story of the beginning of the story, the beta shows us the downfall of the Avengers on “A-Day”, a day when their guns were turned against. them, urging the public to turn away and seek refuge and safety on the side of a megalomaniac scientist at the head of the company AIM Limiting himself to two small scripted missions, including that of the bridge that we have already seen several times in video, the beta remains enigmatic about the story, content to explain to us that we aim to play Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel) reunite the Avengers to put them back on the scene. We will be honest: the bit of history did not stuck us, because if Kamala Khan is terribly sympathetic, the narration and the staging are classic and generic as possible.
—The heart of this overview is on the gaming systems side, which makes the title of Crystal Dynamics look like a certain Warframe. Broken down into relatively short missions with repeated objectives (recovering objects, defending positions …), all accessible from the operations table, the game borrows heavily in its structure from the famous free to play. With the exception that here, the heroes are unlocked through the story. We therefore find ourselves alone with companions controlled by the” title=”
HE
Acronym of the expression “Artificial Intelligence”. Artificial intelligence directs the reactions of creatures controlled by the computer.
“> IA, or in line cooperation of up to four, to survey relatively large, but very linear levels at the four corners of the map, each” title=”
Level
The “level” of a character symbolizes his degree of expertise. When created, the character starts at level 1 and accumulates experience (see this term) to level up. The higher the level, the more powerful the character and has various skills.
“> level having its defined rewards and all kinds of secrets to collect: collectibles (comic book covers), chests (equipment) and other secret rooms that are full of rare equipment. Indeed, here too Marvel’s Avengers does not invent much by relying on a system of Loot
From the English verb “to loot”, literally meaning “to loot”. By extension, a “loot” is the booty that can be looted from the corpse of a defeated enemy (gold or objects used by a defeated hostile creature). Most MMOGs incorporate various mechanisms for sharing loots between members of the same group who have together defeated an opponent. See also: Drop
“>loot which looks like many other games before it, the kind where each piece of equipment is represented by a color which symbolizes its rarity. There are obviously resources to improve the equipment, but overall there isn’t much that is exciting about this tried-and-true system that fans or detractors are unlikely to change their minds about. with this game. Fortunately, the title manages to hook us a little more on its combat system. Although they sometimes look like button-masher with a technicality that is not really obvious (a weak blow, a strong blow, a dodge, three special hits), the fights are dynamic and offer a real feeling of impact on the blows given , especially when using special skills specific to each character or their ultimate blows that are triggered by charging a power bar. Unfortunately, not all heroes are created equal: Hulk and Thor tend to be rather heavy and painful to handle while Captain America, Iron Man, Black Widow and Ms. Marvel surprise in more paced fights than the videos would suggest. before we finally get to the game. All is not perfect, it often lacks fluidity between the sequences, the fights tend to become messy when the enemies are more numerous and there is certainly a lack of combos to last over time , but the first contact turns out to be quite pleasant as we appreciate the clearly identifiable fighting styles of each hero. However, the game fishing to balance the fights and is sometimes too simple: the small ones serve as cannon fodder while the big and slow enemies seem unable to touch us as long as we use dodge. Finally, it is only the enemies who shoot us from afar that can pose a problem, and again: it is quickly resolved with the heroes most comfortable at a distance.
—Added to this balancing problem is an already painful repetitiveness when we only spent a weekend in the beta. The objectives are repeated, there are many different environments, but the Level
English term meaning “Level”. The “level” can designate the level of a character (see this term) or the level of a game, which designates an area whose area is clearly delimited (see Level designer).
“>level
design is so uninspired that the levels tend to look the same, and worse yet, there isn’t too much diversity in the types of enemies faced. The game tries to bring a little originality with enemies who manipulate certain elements, forcing us to use the right stuff to improve our defense against the element in question, but for the moment this remains rather anecdotal. Fortunately, the progression system isn’t bad, with heroes who each accumulate experience when selected for a mission, being able to unlock active and passive skills with hard-earned experience points. The skill tree was limited in beta, however, but there was already plenty to power up pretty quickly. We still hope that the full game will offer more diverse content, both on the missions and the skills to be unlocked, otherwise we risk going around in circles much too quickly for a title that claims to be a “service game” with the hope of ” operation and updates over several months or years.The beta that makes Thor
—Especially since the developers have many things to improve between now and the release. Calibrated for cooperation, the game for example prevented us from accessing a secret room by” title=”
Solo
Neologism generally designating a player or a class of character playing alone, or even the fact of successfully defeating an opponent without the help of his fellow soldiers. Some character classes are known for their “solo” abilities (rogue classes, most often – see Snape – with some spellcasters).
“>solo, because the wall could only be destroyed by the Hulk: we couldn’t tell the AI, who was controlling the Hulk, our willingness to break the wall. Granted, this encourages cooperation and leveling up each hero (especially since it’s impossible to select the same hero as a partner), but it can be very frustrating when playing alone. Even more in this closed beta during which matchmaking was hardly working, leaving us only a very short glimpse of what should be the main interest of the game: playing co-op with friends. However, co-op isn’t everything, and developers will need to make sure that the AI isn’t completely useless in solo, especially if you intend at one point or another to do and repeat the same thing over and over again. mission to unlock special equipment.
—Finally, we had a real visual disappointment. First of all, know that the beta in which we took part took place on PlayStation 4. Very quickly, a few problems arose to us: the framerate is very unstable and struggles to keep up to thirty frames per second when There’s some action (that is, pretty much all of the time) as the game seems to use dynamic resolution that tends to panic. All you have to do is come up against four or five enemies and fire a few hits to see the image blur and become very pixelated, before resuming a more flattering shape when the action calms down a bit. Admittedly, the use of dynamic resolution is not uncommon these days, but the changes are seen too much and impinge largely on the visual quality of the title. And that’s a real problem: while the PlayStation 4 version could be preferred by some players for content that will be exclusive to it, we are faced with a game that struggles to run properly.
Conclusion
Thanks to the license, Crystal Dynamics also has the merit of offering a game that is frankly not unpleasant to play, quite the contrary. The fights are nice and we can see very well how we could have fun with friends during the release on September 4th. Unfortunately, this short beta already questions us about the content and its relevance, as well as the multiple technical and visual concerns that developers face. Not convinced for the moment, we still remain curious to see if the game will be able to hook us with its history and cooperation, because it is probably for the pleasure of traveling the Marvel universe with friends that the cooperative game will be able to draw its Because it really works: controlling the Marvel heroes in this type of game is particularly appealing and it would be a lie to say that we did not have fun during this test weekend. However, while waiting to see more, this beta is not really reassuring, because there is not much of interest beyond the license.
Preview produced by Hachim0n on PlayStation 4 using code provided by the publisher.
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