PS4 Open Beta Impressions, August 2020

If you've played the Arkham trilogy or Spider-Man or God of War, and you like Destiny-style looting and leveling..... Then this game is gonna tease you with a combination of ideas that never quite come together.

My take is: this is a video game. It's not very interesting or novel, you've seen this all before. But it's not bad, really. Just boring.

What's cool is that all the characters do actually feel meaningfully different, even if you are still gonna be doing light-light-heavy most of the time. What's not cool is that it's all kinda chunky. It just doesn't have the flow state feel that Arkham or Spider-Man has. This kinda leaves you to just run all over the place wishing you could read the room better and that your teammates would stop killing enemies before you could get in a satisfying hit.

A big highlight is how fun it is to play Ms Marvel and Hulk. They were smart to make them the focus on the demo, and presumably of the start of the game. Ms Marvel is really interesting, she's got longer ranged melee attacks, and she's reasonably fast. She can also swing around on her stretchy arms and it's really dang fun. Makes me think that the Spider-Man update for PS4 could be a reskin of her in some way (this is speculative). Hulk is more interesting than he may seem as well. He does just bounce around and crush everything, but there are some fun moves, and he actually moves pretty fast. There's a lot of weight to the animations that makes for a surprisingly satisfying experience.

The other two characters you can level up freely, Black Widow and Iron Man, are kinda fine to me. Iron Man has a problem where you control flight and your reticule with the right stick at the same time. If you want to aim down, you have to start flying down too. It's really frustrating. Black Widow has the problem of being the the person without superpowers. So she ends up being really fast and can be satisfying to beat enemies down as you dodge and roll and shoot and grapple, but she just doesn't have the very physically pleasing animations of Hulk or Ms Marvel or the power of Iron Man.

It's also good that you can play the entire game solo, it seems. The mission start menus are kinda confusing, so you might get real players and you might not. You can toggle it, but it's confusing.

As for the loot, it seems just fine. The loot that you get has several statistics that never quite make sense. For example, your health pool is called Willpower. Why not just call it health? It confuses me.

Loot has an overall power rating, and the bigger that is, the better. Loot can also have perks like "performing a perfect dodge will make your next attack deal 32.5% extra cosmic damage" or "having this specific node on the skill tree unlocked will change your damage to shock type." All of that is fine, but I don't know what shock, cosmic, particle, cryo, or whatever damage is. It doesn't mean anything to me, and the game doesn't help me understand it, so why would I care? Perhaps this is better tutorialized in the main release.

This leaves the loot feeling really bland in comparison to other games that have taken up the Destiny structure, including Destiny itself. Perks and boons don't make sense and aren't clearly communicating what actually changes if I use this piece of gear vs another.

I will be playing the final release, but this beta leaves me feeling satisfied for now because it doesn't feel like there's much to be interested in. I'm gonna wait for updates and new characters, and importantly, a sale. I love loot games, MMOs, and Marvel, so I'm gonna play it eventually.

This game will do well, and it's probably for the best that it's not absolute trash. But part of me feels like if it was really bad, it could have been given time to become something really awesome, like an FFXIV comeback story. Instead, I predict it's just gonna coast on a fun license paired with a mediocre combat system.