By Jose Baixauli
Marvel Rivals is a game that was first announced in March of 2024 along with a brand new branch of Marvel called “Marvel Games” as a brand new live service game that took inspiration from shooters like Overwatch and Team Fortress 2 and with a Marvel spin onto it.
When it was announced, fans of Marvel had very mixed feelings. Marvel has had a track record with their video games. Whether it be the disaster that was Marvel’s Avengers or their many poorly made mobile games, fans weren’t sure what to expect from this new game. The company that produced it, NetEase Games, is not known for anything other than mobile games.
That said, fans also noticed some promising things about the newly announced game. Fans instantly fell in love with the cast of characters chosen and the art style in which they are portrayed.
Fans also noticed the potential of the game. Overwatch has solely held the team hero shooter genre since they won Game of the Year in 2016. However, Overwatch made some horrible mistakes in their run that eventually made their game die out shortly after the release of Overwatch 2. Fans realized that if Marvel Rivals could avoid these errors, and listened to their fans, they could dethrone Overwatch and take their top spot.
Predicting this response from fans, Marvel decided to release an early beta test in May of the same year. This was an amazing move by Marvel since they could see where their game was loved and hated. Luckily for Marvel, people loved it. Marvel Rivals made a cast of well-known characters that are just genuinely fun to play.
One thing Overwatch royally screwed up, along with many other things, was completely ruining the fun of their characters with balance changes. These balancing changes made some characters so bad that if you used them your team would lose extremely quickly, or so good that you couldn’t win a game without them.
Marvel Rivals got around this by making every character so unreasonably strong that they all balanced each other out, while still managing to feel very fun. The beta release also helped Marvel nerf some characters and catch some game-breaking bugs.
After shutting down the beta, Marvel added some new characters and fully released Season Zero of the game on December 6, 2024. Fans loved it. The cast of characters was well-known while still adding in some new lesser-known characters.
On launch, the game had 400 thousand concurrent players only 72 hours after release on Steam alone. Marvel Rivals had successfully overthrown Overwatch 2 in the team hero shooter genre and had them desperately trying to get their fanbase back, plagiarizing Fortnite’s OG update, releasing one of their own, and collaborating with Avatar The Last Airbender. However, it didn’t work.
Today, Marvel Rivals has 200k players on Steam and is soon releasing Season 1 of their game this Friday, January 10th, releasing four new characters, the Fantastic Four, along with a new map. This marks the company successfully releasing more new characters in a month than Overwatch has in years.
Marvel Rivals will only continue to gain more traction if they continue to dodge the mistakes Overwatch made and keep the chaotic and fun aspects that they already excel at.
The Best 3 Heroes
Hela is debatably the best character in the game. Her hit scan attacks along with her 20% season damage boost make her attacks always land and do massive damage. She is the #1 most banned character in competitive games since she’s so annoyingly good.
Hawkeye is the other contender for the best character. He can One-Shot every duelist and strategist in the game with a headshot and, even one of his body shots does a bit over half their health. He is the #2 most banned character in the competitive games.
Luna Snow is the best strategist (healer) in the game. Her ultimate ability, Fate of Both Worlds, is easily the best in the game, allowing for the best heals along with a damage boost as long as you’re in her massive radius. She is the #3 most banned character in competitive games.
Fire