Don't get me wrong, I hated Overwatch for plenty of reasons. I got told to play healer and make sandwiches anytime I turned my mic on and the power balance for the characters never really reached a good place. Still, I loved it. The colorful, almost fantasy-like designs of the cast, the wide array of abilities that were more than just "gun," and the sheer size of the community were all unbeatable in my eyes. I'd resigned the feeling to the past and moved on, thinking those golden days were over.
Then, my brother convinced me to download Marvel Rivals.
There are so many characters to choose from that all boast different kits and skill floors and, most importantly, designs. Everyone who plays will find a favorite. The best strategy, as YouTuber TheRussianBadger points out, is to master one hero from every category - being Duelist (dps), Strategist (support), and Vanguard (tanks). My favorites are Scarlet Witch, Invisible Woman, and Doctor Strange respectively.
As an Invisible Woman main, I've found I'm either everyone's favorite person or compared to Satan and his spawn. Every player has strong opinions about every character, and frankly, that's a good sign. If your lineup is so diverse that everyone has different opinions about every character and their threat level, you've made an actually unique lineup instead of a copy-paste with slightly different guns.
As of right now, Season 5.5, I've secured my spot in Platinum I and have put almost two hundred hours into the game. Competitive is by far my favorite game mode since everyone who's there is in it to win. It's fun to trash talk all in good fun, call shots or heed a good call to clutch a game, and ban people who call you slurs since Rivals actually cares about the safety of its community. One of my favorite matches was as Scarlet Witch with a line of supports who could hear my mic but didn't have any themselves. I was able to protect them effectively with a code system using their basic communication wheel; thumbs up for push forward, fall back for protection when attacked, etc. They all DMed me afterwards to thank me for considering the well-being of the healers in the heat of battle. It was so rewarding to see people care and caring so much yourself.
Quick Play is where all of the frustration comes from. Players are randomly matched against each other, meaning you may end up with a team of low-skill players who get wiped immediately, which sucks. Or, maybe even worse, you end up with a team of Grandmasters who won't even let the other team leave spawn, forcing them to surrender and you don't even get to play at all. There's also no ban function in Quick Play, meaning you're up against the most toxic comps in the game, and there's only so many times you get canceled by Penni Parker before you just need to quit.
The Arcade options are always fun for something quick and casual that isn't a nightmare like Quick Play is. My personal favorite right now is Marvel Zombies. It feels more intimate with only four heroes instead of the usual six, and ramming full speed into zombies as Jeff is very satisfying.
This game is free to play, which means skins and in-game currency costs real money. They're expensive, too. However, Rivals is very good about rewarding you with in-game currency and skins as often as possible. Half of my hero roster boasted alternate looks before I spent a dime on the game. Between the achievements, Christmas event, New Year's event, and the occasional gift from Galacta, I was able to buy a legendary skin without touching my wallet. I've since spent about thirty dollars total on the game (a battlepass, the Disappearing Dessert skin for Invisible Woman, Psylocke's Fleeting Butterfly skin, and about a hundred lattice to cover the rest of the tokens I needed for the new Cloak & Dagger winter skin). That's still not as much as I've spent on major games, and honestly, you don't need the skins to play the game. I'm just addicted to getting sparkly and cute pixels for my favorite heroes. I've met players in lobbies who've never bought a skin before and only used the free ones Rivals hands out every season, and they seemed perfectly content.
I've heard many complaints that the free-to-play method is predatory and causes people to spend more money on games than if they'd just charged a base fee for the game, and I completely agree. I'm not a fan, and honestly, I like the method Helldivers II uses for battlepasses and in-game currency way better. However, and this may just be because I have a developed frontal lobe and can't steal my mom's credit card, I've never felt compelled to buy something. Any time I have, it's been because it was a few dollars and I already had some in-game stuff that was given to me for free. Rivals has been pretty good about keeping their community in mind. You can see it in the way they design the skins. They know their audience.
Speaking of fan service, Marvel Rivals is very good about adding heroes to the roster. Every season, we've gotten new characters with new powers and come up with new ways to win using them. My favorite addition is definitely Gambit. I'm so happy we got a character with complexity and a bigger kit in the Strategist category. He's so fun to play or have on your team. People who play Gambit really get into it and I think that's amazing. I've had a Gambit save me from getting destroyed by a Vanguard when I was playing Sue Storm, and when I thanked them in chat, they said "anytime, chere." Immaculate.
I really love playing Rivals in my downtime. It gives me an outlet for battle strategizing, trash talking, and good, old-fashioned teamwork in the same way Overwatch did all those years ago. I think it's better than Overwatch, actually. If you haven't given it a shot yet, I'd say go for it. A fair warning, though: You need a pretty powerful device to play. The servers are almost always bogged down and you'll rubber band like crazy on bad days even if you've got the best PC possible. I personally use my PS5 and it works fine most of the time.
See you on the battlefield!
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