Netease announce Marvel Rivals, a free-to-play 6v6 shooter that desperately wants to be superhero Team Fortress

rockpapershotgun.com:

In case Amy Hennig's Captain America and Black Panther game 1943: Rise Of Hydra wasn't going to be quite enough to satisfy your Marvel hunger, Netease have just announced they've got another comic book bun in the oven for you. Marvel Rivals is a free-to-play, third-person team shooter where two teams of six heroes and villains go head to head with each other in destructible arenas. I can't say its reveal trailer has me particularly pumped - the game looks and feels a bit like it's ten years too late. Still, why not come and have a gander at it below.

As you can see from the trailer, one of the game's stand-out strategies appears to be the 'Team-Up' ability, which sees two characters band together for super-charged attacks. The trailer shows some classic, obvious combos such as Iron Man and Hulk, where Iron Man can use Hulk's Gamma energy to unleash a powerful energy beam, as well as Rocket The Raccoon riding around on Groot's back. There are also two other characters who do a big 'Team-Up' that I'm not sure I recognise at first glance, though at a guess I'd say one of them appears to be Aqua Man, while the other is some kind of ice lady.

It's unclear at the moment whether these Team-Up abilities will be limited to certain character pairings, or if you'll be able to pull them off with whoever happens to be in your team that match. If it's the former, I can see team compositions becoming quite repetitive and stale after a while, though with an alpha test due to arrive in May, it hopefully won't be long before we find out.

Netease have announced that characters from all across the Avengers, Guardians Of The Galaxy, X-Men and wider Marvelverse will be available to play in Rivals, and the alpha test will have just over a dozen of them to choose from, including Black Panther, Spider-Man, Magneto and Magik.

Each map will also have destructible elements that Netease say will create "ever-changing battlefields", but I'm not sure the footage in the trailer really looks all