Marvel Heroes MMO Review

Introduction

Marvel Heroes is an MMO made by Gazillion Entertainment which is themed around the Marvel Universe in which you can play and level well known Marvel characters such as Spider-Man, Iron Man, Hulk, Star-Lord, Rocket Raccoon and Wolverine you can also play as some lesser known Marvel characters such as Squirrel Girl, Gambit, Moon Knight, Black Panther, Dr Strange and Psylocke. The max level is 60 and rather than a class-based system like most MMOs, there are 53 playable characters in the game and more like a MOBA (for example, League Of Legends) these are unlockable via real world or in-game currency, however in this respect like a typical MMO you can be levelling multiple at one time. Also unlike an MMO is the eagle-eye top down view of the game, much like RPGs such as the Diablo and Torchlight series. The game uses an instance system similar to the original Guild Wars in that each area, major cities, smaller instances etc is its own instance and a player has to load in and out as they move around the map. The differences end there though and it’s pretty much a regular MMO after that.

Positives

Starting with the positives of the game, it has a really simple feel to it in the earlier difficulties and getting from 1-60 is super easy especially because of the waypoint system, in which you can use waypoints to travel to various different waypoints, but waypoints are saved to accounts not characters so if you have just finished hitting 60 with Venom and want to level Scarlet Witch you don’t have to hunt around random maps to find the quest instances (more on this later) , you can just waypoint there instead. Another cool feature for levelling is that the more characters you have at level 60, the more XP you earn when doing quests, killing mobs etc, so each character gets easier to level.

Fortune cards can also be bought with real world currency, with the exception of fortune card 1 being available for purchase for 10 cube shards (an in-game currency you get from doing terminals, which are basically dungeons from WoW). These have a chance of giving rare rewards but more often than not give boosts to rare and special item find, XP or a combination of the 3. In short, levelling to 60 takes around 10 hours of gameplay which is quite a short time compared to other MMOs.

The in-game currency is easy to farm (there are many forms of it), eternity splinters being the easiest to farm, these are used to buy a variety of things but more notably heroes in the game, the drop rate is one splinter every 8 minutes and hero prices range from 200-600 of them, but you can also buy a random hero unlock for 175 splinters. The character interface is really smooth, you press T to bring it up and from there you can select which character you want to switch into. You can play 10 characters up to level 10, but you can only choose one to uncap and play properly.

Another unique but fun mechanic of the game is the team-up system, team-up heroes are even lesser known characters of the marvel universe (although there are a few others, like spider-man) who you can summon for a limited duration to give a boost to some of your characters stats, depending on the team-up, just like heroes they can be bought with in-game or real world currency. Mechanics wise the game does feel really smooth for the most part, you move around by holding down the right mouse button and your skills are the number buttons, you also get 3 action bars and can switch temporarily to action bar 2 from one by pressing the ALT key so you aren’t limited to just one action bar of skills. Loading from instance to instance is pretty fast and has never taken me longer than about 5 seconds to do.

The talent interface for the game.

Negatives

Moving onto the negatives now, the skills themselves and even loading individual parts of an instance can be pretty laggy if there are a lot of people in the current instance, quite a few of the skills animations don’t even show up half the time when you’re using them, the games does feel quite lack-luster in that department.

The bosses are easy as hell, although once you get onto cosmic terminals (the highest difficulty of terminal) they hit really hard and you have to do a lot of dodging and using your cooldowns, however if you die the boss retains its health it was at when you died, so essentially dying on bosses isn’t a problem which means boss fights aren’t really hard, but they can be really long and boring if you’re not properly geared for the fight, and the sad thing is when you’re fresh 60 to get properly geared to fight say, cosmic Dr Doom, you need to beat that terminal to get gear to beat it in the first place.

The game is a serious grind fest, earlier levels it’s all questing and the usual stuff sure, but just like on games such as Diablo 3, you are searching everywhere (and I do mean that literally) to find the instance you need for your quest, sometimes you can be searching for like 20 minutes just to find somewhere you need. The endgame is a literal grind fest, you have cosmic terminals to do and there are raids and other things such as patrols (basically world boss zones) but all you’re really doing is spending god knows how many hours a day grinding patrols or cosmics for items that have around a 0.1% drop rate, it can take weeks to get even half decent geared. Other than those facts the game is pretty solid built.