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Marvel’s Avengers is a large-scale action game in the Marvel comic’s universe, dedicated to the Avengers and other famous superheroes. It is also a “bitmap” – that is, most of the time you have to fight, knocking out simple combos on the gamepad and watching how characters with characteristic sounds beat enemies.

However, Marvel’s Avengers is a game-service, and this is important to understand before purchasing. We tell you what else you need to know about the new project of the Crystal Dynamics studio (the last three parts of Tomb Raider).

Before the release on September 4, I managed to play quite a bit of Marvel’s Avengers, but even in these five-plus hours, the action managed to surprise – in a good way. The developers have repeatedly said that all tasks in the game will be divided into several types – plot, side with an emphasis on co-op, trials, and so on. Beta, which took place in August, showed only an introduction and one story mission, and was also full of monotonous military co-op operations. This hinted that it simply would not work to go through Marvel’s Avengers as a regular story game – sooner or later, you would have to be distracted by extraneous activities.

And it really is – but only in part. Yes, Marvel’s Avengers is still a service game where you should pay attention to side quests and challenges, hunt for loot and – in the future! – go to raids, but at the same time, the plot and epic missions in it are full. In other words, playing Marvel’s Avengers as a single-player story game is also possible – it provides all the possibilities for this. This, most likely, will not completely save you from side activities, but it is still impossible to say that this is a game only about co-op and endless grind.

For example, the first two or three hours of Marvel’s Avengers is generally a completely and completely story-driven single-player game in the spirit of Spider-Man for PS4. The intro, dedicated to A-Day and the tragic events in San Francisco, is followed by a very long episode after Kamala Khan, which tells how the United States has been living without the Avengers for several years.

The events of that fateful day led to the fact that many people acquired unusual abilities – but not everyone benefited from them. In general, most people hate nonhumans (as the newly-born mutants were called), as well as superheroes who made the disaster in San Francisco and the death of many citizens. And the park with sculptures of Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk and other characters has become a favorite place for vandals in four years, although some people still come there to pay homage to superheroes.

Kamala Khan is a loyal fan of the Avengers, and it seems to her that someone set up the superheroes. She finds evidence of this and goes to look for a local resistance base, where she meets the Hulk. During this time, she will visit the neon-flooded metropolis, and the desert, and some deep forests, and then, together with Bruce Banner, will go to look for the old base of Tony Stark. All these are story missions, during which the creators politely do not load you with information about the cooperative, or tons of loot, or side activities.

Instead, they allow you to calmly explore insanely beautiful locations, look for collectibles and references to comics and films. References are generally a separate conversation. The scene at the A-Day festival alone is worth something: in it Kamala, still without the superpower to stretch her body, wanders the fair, where there is simply an incredible amount of detail and references to all types of media where Marvel superheroes have appeared. Even the cult phrase I Am Iron Man was beaten – and quite funny!

At the same time, in these two or three hours, the developers were able to fit both stealth episodes, and sections with platforming, and, of course, battles with robots of the A.I.M. corporation, which is one of the villains here. And now everything that in Marvel’s Avengers is connected with the “beat-up” is, perhaps, the second reason (the first is the love of Marvel comics) to play the game Crystal Dynamics.

As a bitmap, Marvel’s Avengers is a fairly simple but very effective game where you can finally fulfill your old dream – to fly Iron Man over the battlefield or, say, destroy everything around, playing as the Hulk.

Formally, each of the heroes, which open up as the story progresses, has their own class and unique skills and combos (and in a co-op all this can even be correctly combined), but in the battles themselves, the differences are primarily visual. And this is not bad in itself – it is fun to beat opponents, and no one seems to have promised a deep fighting game.