Marvel Rivals is already fun, but it needs to lock down its identity

After spending a weekend with the Marvel Rivals alpha test, I discovered that I had almost completely forgotten it was a Marvel game.

From the moment it was revealed, Marvel Rivals was labeled an Overwatch clone. That comparison wasn’t simply due to it being a 6v6 hero shooter with a similar art style, but even its UI looked almost identical to Blizzard’s once-dominant title. The main differentiator we knew of before anyone got their hands on it was the fact that it was a third-person game rather than first-person. Now that I’ve gotten hands-on with the alpha test and have a good idea of what the base Marvel Rivals is attempting to build upon, it is clear it is straddling the line between embracing its Marvel IP and wanting to recapture that original Overwatch experience. And while the current experience is certainly enjoyable, it may need to commit to a direction to have lasting appeal.

Putting the hero in hero shooter

The Marvel Rivals alpha let me sample 19 heroes and villains divided into the familiar Tank, Damage Per Second (DPS), and Support roles. Each character has a star ranking for their difficulty, which is helpful considering the current tutorial is so bare-bones that it may as well be absent. That will hopefully be addressed by the full release, but for now, learning any character is a trial by fire.

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I was able to sample each of the characters in each of the three game modes: Convoy, Domination, and Convergence. These are the standard hero shooter game modes of escorting a payload and capturing points on a map, and they serve as a solid foundation even if they aren’t terribly creative. While I was expecting the game to evoke Overwatch in its UI and controls, I wasn’t prepared for how secondary the Marvel elements would feel in their current implementation. There wasn’t much that screamed “Marvel” in my first few matches aside from some overbearing hero chatter. (I still hear