Marvel Rivals is here and as expected it’s Similar but Legally Distinct to Overwatch. NetEase clearly took very detailed notes in their several years worth of operating Overwatch in China on behalf of Blizzard, because yeah this game cribbed extensively from OW. How is it similar?

  • Art-style / Sound Design – You could take a screenshot from a good 90% of levels, hide the characters, and you would not be able to tell me which game it’s from. Similarly, you can close your eyes and – if you ignore everybody shouting Marvel Super Hero catchphrases back and forth across the map – all the hitmarker sounds, activity sounds, commentator, ability sounds, UI sounds, it’s crazy hard to tell the difference.
  • Abilities – Many heroes kits can be defined in context of Overwatch. Hulk plays like D.va but with Winston’s moveset. Hawkeye is Literally Hanzo. Iron Man plays roughly like Pharah. Magneto has Reinhardt’s shield with Zarya’s bubbles. Cloak & Dagger play like Moira but with Extra Steps. Star Lord plays like Tracer but he can fly, can drop a baby Reaper ult at-will, and has an aimbot ult similar to Soldier 76. The list of comparisons is endless and unavoidable.
  • Game Modes – Overwatch obviously didn’t invent Zone Control, King of the Hill, or Payload but their specific implementation here is pulled straight from OW, and they didn’t bring anything new to the table on that front.

…but literally none of this matters. Game rules.

Yes it looks and sounds unnervingly like OW. Yes a lot of the character kits look like they just reassembled the constituent parts of OW. Yes it’s just got all the same basic multiplayer modes. But that’s fine because the result is incredibly well-done. Map design is great, character design is great, the abilities are LUDICROUSLY varied and interestingly remixed even when they feel more than a little derivative.

The game is STARTING with a roster of 33. The variety is all over the place. Nobody feels like a generic shooter character apart from Punisher. All the characters have a kit that suits them perfectly, and balance wise they seem to be taking an approach of “screw it make everybody overpowered”, and that makes the whole roster feel viable. Yes, a few definitely feel FAR over-tuned right now like Iron Fist and Hawkeye, but they don’t feel outright invincible.

Functionally the game is also pretty incredible. It plays great, even on console. Queue times are basically instant. Ping-times are great. UI is fine, it’s a little weird on console, but as far as massively-multi-platform game UIs go it’s shockingly functional for something that JUST launched. They also have partially destructible environments all over the place – which open up some interesting flanking opportunities – and they also have responsive environments where some maps transform when control over a zone changes.

Also shocking, the monetization is incredibly fair. They took the Fortnite model, where the whole ass game is completely free no strings attached. No locked characters. No locked content of any kind. Yes there’s a Battle Pass, and a Cosmetic Store, but it’s all direct-buy cosmetics, no loot boxes, no randomization, just straight up buy thing -> get thing. The Battle Pass / Seasonal Model is also structured so the only time-limit is to buy it. If you want some cosmetic from the Season 0 Battle Pass you just have to buy it now, finish it whenever.

So all the “LMAO IT’S JUST OVERWATCH LOL” comments are irrelevant, what’s actually wrong with the game?

  • No Role Queue – The only composition requirement right now is 1 character copy per team, no role limits. This means most matches end up a DPS Mosh Pit. But that’s fine, it took forever for Blizzard to implement Role Queue, I expect they’ll do it soon enough. They claim they will not be implementing Role Queue or Role Limits, but… we’ll see how that pans out over time.
  • Getting Spawn Trapped Sucks – Related to the above, it’s very easy to get spawn trapped if you’ve got a balanced comp up against a very imbalanced comp. Getting spawn trapped blows and there’s not a whole lot you can do about it in solo queue.
  • Movement Imbalance Sucks – The gap between the lowest and highest movement heroes is HUGE. It makes sense, Spider-Man should be able to zip all over the map. Groot should be a lumbering giant. But some characters have effectively no means of dashing or running, or only have it on a pretty long cooldown. So if you’re trying to get out of a firefight to heal up and Spider-Man or Iron Fist drop on you you’re screwed and basically just have to take the death. I don’t know what you do about this.
  • Flyers feel like garbage on Controller – There’s several characters that are constant fliers, or otherwise spend a lot of time in the air, and woof they feel awful on Controller, with height managed with left bumper/left trigger. Barf.

But despite all those, the game is super fun. I’m having a great time with the following heroes:

  • Moon Knight is great on attack or defend. His core attack style is based around throwing ankhs on specific zones, and then bouncing your attacks off those, which turns your primary pulse-style attack into a devastating AOE chaining attack. IMMENSELY satisfying when you find a good angle and the whole opposing team walks through it.
  • Psylocke feels like something between Genji and Sombra, and despite not having a lot of mobility, still plays pretty great.
  • Jeff the Land Shark is an adorable support, great mobility, good single-target heals and pickup-based heals too. The primary heal ability is pretty long range but you actually have to target it and sustain it because it’s basically a firehose. His ult is amazing for zone capture modes, you dive into the floor and can consume all players in a zone roughly the size of a capture point. Friendlies get protected temporarily and can be spit out independently, while enemies take DOT and can be kidnapped, dragged off the point, and spit off the map if there’s a pit nearby. Very easy to make huge plays with this.
  • Wolverine is a pretty great purely melee character, and he’s so wide. Comedically wide.
  • Iron Fist is probably the most broken character in the game at the moment. He’s purely melee, but his mobility kit is second only to Spider-Man with a dash kick, unlimited wall-run, and a triple-jump on basically no cooldown. He also has the easiest self-heal in the game, you just press the button and he heals, and doesn’t just heal he gets an overshield if he overflows his max hp. And on top of all this his base DPS is bonkers, with every hit decreasing all his cooldowns, and one of his cooldowns negates incoming damage from all sources AND juices his DPS even further. He is A Problem.

The roster is so immense that even with only these 5 picked as ones I like right now, I’m basically always guaranteed to have somebody to play, without having to fight about somebody insta-locking my main.

So yeah, go play it. It’s free. It’s available on everything. Nothing to lose.

No telling if it’s going to have staying-power, or if the cosmetics are going to justify the almost certainly insane licensing and development cost of the game, but while it’s here I’m playing the hell out of it and greatly enjoying myself.