Games: Marvel Heroes

It’s only taken a year of vague promises but Marvel Heroes, an MMORPG featuring beloved characters such as Spider-man, Wolverine and the Avengers, has finally arrived for Mac users.

The game is free-to-play to the extent where you can play through all the content without paying a penny, but transactions allow you to buy characters of your choice as well as certain bonuses. You start off with a choice of six characters, who are admittedly of the slightly lesser known variety, although I was at least able to pick an X-Men character – Storm. These starter characters do apparently vary over time, I noticed that Rocket Raccoon was available currently to coincide with the release of Guardians of the Galaxy. All characters feature unique abilities, ranging from attacks designed to effect one enemy to ones for groups, which can be levelled up allowing for variety in play styles.

Gameplay itself comes down to a beat-em-up style, pitting your hero against a seemingly never-ending army of enemies related to big enemies from the Marvel universe, many of whom are working with Doctor Doom who has obtained a powerful alien device and intends to use it to take over the Earth. Fighting through these enemies becomes incredibly repetitive – even with the variety of attacks you can use, after a while you’ll most likely spam the same few buttons. While bosses use different styles of attack they too can be beaten in this button mashing manner. And if you should die when you come back from a checkpoint, all of your previous damage still exists, taking away any real challenge.

Extra characters are available through an in-game currency which must be purchased with real cash. Characters don’t all cost the same, with most costing about 900 points (the equivalent of about £6) , the most popular characters are more expensive while obscure characters are cheaper. Rather annoyingly, you can only use the currency in set amounts that don’t correspond to what you actually want to buy, meaning that you’re left with leftover cash that you can’t really use. However it is also possible to purchase all heroes using another currency called Eternity Splinters which are dropped by villains throughout the game. It can take quite some time to obtain enough splinters to actually buy a hero, as they are dropped one at a time by certain bosses and it takes 400 or more depending on the character.

I chose to buy Psylocke, one of my favourite X-Men, as well as an alternate costume for her when I became bored of Storm’s playing style – for a weather goddess a surprising amount of her attacks were lightning based. Her play style mixed things up considerably, being focused on her ninja skills as well as her telepathic and telekinetic weapons. Due to a limited time deal that gave you another random character for free I also obtained Cyclops, who I found much too weak and have barely used – though I was initially thrilled that somehow I got another X-Man out of the 35 heroes currently available.

There are also team-up characters who act as a sort of back-up for the hero but aren’t playable, providing bonuses and helping you fight enemies. You can choose from four characters: Spider-man, Firestar, Magik and Falcon and they cost 400 points, also being obtainable with Eternity Splinters. While not essential to playing through the game, these Team-ups do make gameplay a bit easier, in fact if you’re ever getting bored of fighting through hordes of enemies you can just leave your sidekick to do it for you.

The game’s graphics are hardly the most advanced, which is covered up with a very zoomed-out camera that prevents you from seeing how lousy they are. Thankfully, they are good enough that characters are easily identifiable. Cutscenes for the most part are motion comics, meaning that they are essentially still images with some occasional movement, and while they feature some fun lines they’re quite skippable. Each character has a unique voice, but unfortunately as cutscenes are set with the same characters you won’t get to hear characters like Storm or Psylocke speak much outside of combat, where they say the same few things over and over.

Marvel Heroes isn’t the most remarkable game; it’s repetitive in many regards and will hardly change your life. Different heroes do mix things up but hardly enough to get over its basic nature, fighting through armies of very similar enemies en masse. However as a free-to-play game it is at least a bit of fun and if you have more patience than me, you can play as your favourite character without having to pay a penny.