Marvel Rivals Preview – A new, better Overwatch?

thesixthaxis.com:

Last week I managed to get some time with Marvel Rivals, the next big PvP shooter set to (excuse the pun) rival games such as Overwatch and the like. Marvel is obviously a licence to print money and generally, you can slap Marvel branding on anything these days and you know it will do well to some degree. Of course, there’s an element of burnout as well. People are just a little bit sick of Marvel, because let’s face it, it’s everywhere.

NetEase Games doesn’t care one bit about all that, and has set out to make an actual banger of a third-person PvP shooter. I have to use Overwatch as a comparison because, for all intents and purposes, it’s Overwatch with a Marvel skin. Well, sort of.

The key difference is the switch-up from first-person to third-person, and to be quite honest, this feels a lot better. Overwatch was littered with fancy skins which you only saw in key moments during gameplay. In Rivals, you get to see them all the time, which, if you’re spending money to see these skins, is kind of a big deal.

The starting roster is already enjoyably large, with lots of your favourite Marvel characters involved. Some of the more obvious ones such as Iron Man, Hulk and Thor make an appearance, but then you have some not-so-well-known characters make an appearance too which is nice, such as Jeff the Baby Land Shark and Luna Snow.

I must have put about fifteen to twenty hours into Rivals so far and still didn’t manage to play the whole roster, trying to give ample time to the ones I did try. Surprisingly, despite being a fan of the big green guy, my go-to main quickly became the thunder goddess Storm. Her ability to stay in the air and hurl the elements at enemies from above just appealed to me. And when she drops her ultimate ability, oh man, things get messy. I was regularly dropping at least three to four enemies at a time in one fell swoop.

So yeah, much like Overwatch, ultimate abilities play a big part of matches, with them building up as you play, and then dropping