Marvel Heroes is a free to play ARPG with MMO elements by Gazillion Entertainment made by some of the same developers involved in the Diablo series and the Marvel Ultimate Alliance series. This team has a lot of potential, first releasing Marvel Super Hero Squad and now Marvel Heroes (formerly known as Marvel Universe).
THE FREE PART
Marvel Heroes does not employ any ‘pay 2 win’ elements. You can pick a character and play through the campaign and endgame content and hit max level all without spending a penny. Your road to max level will not be any different than someone who paid money. Out of a roster of approximately 22 heroes, you can pick one character out of four (Hawkeye, Thing, Storm and Scarlet Witch) to start your journey and honestly these are some of the best most balanced characters in the game. You will also get a random character drop of those same four after you finish the tutorial. Lastly when you complete the campaign, you will be awarded another character (it seems like this character is Daredevil from speaking to a few people). All the other characters are capable of dropping as ultra rare loot (think Legendary drops from other ARPGs). However since it’s random, it may take a long time before you get the specific character you want to play.
THE MONEY PART
Marvel Heroes has it’s own virtual game currency, I’ll talk in real money terms here but basically 100G = $1 USD. Gazillion is employing the ‘people can’t figure out the value of fake currency’ system to try and make you not realize exactly how much you’re spending.
All the characters can be purchased for G. There are four tiers of pricing, $6, $9, $12 and $20 which seem to be based on popularity. At the $20 price point we have Deadpool, Spiderman and Ironman. On the low end we have the starter characters plus Daredevil and Black Widow.
Each character has a number of costumes to modify their look. These costumes honestly are over priced and in a lot of cases cost more than the character. There are a few costumes that are very expensive because they are ‘enhanced’ which means they come with all new voice over work and effects such as Deadpools pirate costume. Costumes can drop for free in the game as well at the same rarity as character drops. Gazillion has made an effort to create at least one ‘cheap’ costume at either the $2 or $4.50 price point depending on the character, otherwise costumes run about $11 which is disappointing and overpriced in my opinion.
There are other items you can purchase for real money include inventory stash tabs, boosts, companion pets, respec pots to re-assign skill points and Fortune Cards which give you a random consumable or item from a list which can include pets, characters and costumes.
HYBRID MMO / ARPG
As you move through the campaign you will experience different player populations. Each chapter has a main MMO ‘city’ area where you will see many other players running around doing their own thing. The mob density is pretty high and there are random environment events you can work together on for rewards including boss fights. From the city area you’ll find exits to other areas, these other areas may be solo side quest areas where it’s you vs the yellow mob inside and usually there’s a reward chest but no boss fight. Then there are story areas where if you have the auto-party option turned on, the game will party you with up to 4 other heroes and you will work together through this area usually concluding in a boss fight.
CAMPAIGN
Marvel Heroes is split into 8 chapters, and the story will swing significantly from Chapter 4 to 5. In the first four chapters you’ll be chasing down escaped super villains and a tablet with great power. In the last four chapters you’ll be brought into the anti-mutant wars and visit some more interesting places and even fight Dinosaurs. Along the way you’ll fight many big name Marvel villains like Kingpin, Doc Oct, Elektra, Venom and Magneto to name a few. You will also fight against many enemy factions such as Hydra, The Hand and Sentinels to name a few of those. The campaign will conclude fighting against a bunch of super villains you’ll encounter on your way to the mega boss which is a multi-stage fight. When you finish that, you will be awarded a character (most likely Daredevil) and can do the campaign with a new character or move on to end-game content. The campaign is very enjoyable and the cutscenes are done in a motion comic format which compliments the content of the game perfectly.
END-GAME
I’m just going to say it flat out, the end-game content in Marvel Heroes is lacking. There is stuff to do but this part of the game is not finished development yet. Basically there are three different terminals: a green, red and purple. They also go up in difficulty across the main hero bases of the game. As an example the green terminal in Avengers Tower is the easiest, the green terminal in Xavier’s School has the same missions, they’re just a lot tougher and the green terminal on the S.H.I.E.L.D. harrier is even tougher still. Each mission in the green terminal is a boss fight, you’ll move through the environment fighting along the way to the boss. When you kill the boss, you’ll be awarded a cube shard once every 20 hours which you can accumulate and trade in for a Fortune Card. Once you complete the first mission, the second will unlock and you can do that and so on and so forth. When you enter a green terminal mission, you will be auto-partied with up to four other people. Unfortunately this mostly just becomes a boss rush for players who just want their cube shard which means XP gains are pretty minimal since you’re not clearing each stage.
The red terminals are exactly the same thing except a bit harder and the loot rewards are a little bit better. They used to require a random drop called a Cosmic Key as admission into a red mission. However as of the 7/2/13 patch, this requirement has been removed to open the areas up to everyone and increase player population in these areas. Also XP earnings have been increased and hopefully loot tables have been increased as well.
The purple terminals have challenge missions and survival missions. In the challenge missions, you need to go in with a pre-formed party, for whatever reason it doesn’t seem to auto-party. Your party is given 12 respawns, a time limit and you need to navigate a very large map closing four gates. Your party will be fighting a vast array of different enemy types on the way to each gate and then fight a final boss. When you finish the first challenge mission, the first survival mission will be unlocked. This is where the real fun is. Not only is the survival mission widely regarded as the place to go to grind XP, but you will be partied up with 15 other heroes and it’s mad chaos for 25 minutes. You will fight multiple waves of different enemy types on a large map and it will conclude with a boss fight. While this mode is a lot of fun, 15 heroes all firing off powers and auras and ass kicking from one end of the map to another can make it hard to figure out what to attack, find loot drops or at times even get an attack in before everything’s dead. Needless to say frame rates are an issue in this mode as well even for high end systems.
There is a PVP mode but it’s a mess, unbalanced and needs a lot of work. It’s so broken that it’s not even worth acknowledging that it’s there at the moment. But Gazillion has said they will step up and fix this mode in future patches.
Also in the works for a future patch is the ability to replay the campaign as your current hero with the difficulty increased. This will be added to the game in a future patch release.
LOOT
Loot is the foundation of any ARPG. Marvel Heroes uses the same color system for loot rarity that pretty much everyone else uses. White stuff is trash, Blue stuff is worth picking up for reasons I’ll discuss under crafting and Purple stuff is the stuff you want to be equipping. Absent in Marvel Heroes is an orange drop, there is no traditional legendary gear in this game at this time. What would be considered legendary drops would include characters, costumes and pets, basically stuff for sale for real money. Other items that you will find as drops include Costume Cores which modify a specific stat attribute like ‘fighting skill’, Boss Medals which give you some random properties and artifacts which also give you random properties and you can equip two of those. In-game currency also drops to spend at venders, XP/health/spirit (mana) orbs, health packs, cube shards and crafting elements. One thing I really appreciate about Heroes is that there is no auction house or player to player buying/selling. You get what you get or what you can craft for now, however player trading is being talked about as coming soon with a game currency auction house in the distant future.
On the subject of crafting, instead of selling the stuff you pick up for in game money, you can donate it instead. When you donate gear to venders, they will increase in level and the quality of stuff they have for sale will also go up. The crafter is especially important to level up as it will allow you to turn blue gear into purple gear, add offensive or defensive powers to your costume, craft potions, combine or break apart crafting elements, add a core to your costume and allow you to unbind gear from one character so you can give it to another character. The crafter is very useful in Marvel Heroes and is well worth the time to level up. You will find plenty of money in world as you move through the campaign, so donating gear to venders is the way to go.
CHARACTER PROGRESSION
Like all other MMOs, RPGs and ARPGs, you progress by leveling which is done by gaining XP. In Marvel Heroes, you get XP from killing bad guys but also picking up XP orbs which diminish in value the longer they sit on the ground. When you level up, you will gain some skill points that you can spend on your skill tree. At specific level tiers, you will also level up a costume stat such as your fighting skill which among other things increases the damage you do per attack. If you want to level up at an accelerated rate, there are 1 hour XP boost pots you can buy for G (real money) and they will boost you up 50% for 1 hou and 5 can be stacked for a 100% boost.. On the topic of XP, your character earns ‘rested’ XP on their XP progression bar when you aren’t playing as that hero. As your XP bar fills in over top of the rested XP amount you’ve earned, you get item find and XP earning boosts. For me this is a unique feature to Marvel Heroes, I haven’t run across this in other ARPGs. However it seems to punish you for sticking with one character and leveling them and seems to reward playing multiple characters at a time which is easy because you can bring up your roster and switch heroes on the fly.
The skill trees themselves are fairly simplistic, similar to the depth you saw in Diablo 3 if you played that. Coming to Marvel Heroes from Path of Exile’s skill tree I found it extremely simplified but I also didn’t mind it. Making point assignment decisions took a lot less consideration time. You’re early skills can pretty much be upgraded every level if you have a favorite, the later skills will only let you put a point in every so many levels. Each skill has a max level of 20 points that can be assigned, but a skill can be over-leveled by another 20 from gear attributes which is really nice.
THE VERDICT
If you are a Marvel fan and/or enjoyed playing the Marvel Ultimate Alliance games or even just like ARPGs, Marvel Heroes campaign is a fun time. With being able to party up with four buddies or randoms, the ability to join a SuperGroup aka Clan and the interesting mix of MMO, party and solo areas, the game varies itself quite a bit. The game shows it’s weakness once you get to the end-game content though. The green/red terminals are just re-plays of stuff you did in the campaign, PVP is a mess and many heroes have a hard time keeping up with the difficulty curve of endgame content for various reasons. This keeps them stuck re-playing Avengers Tower content which is the easiest level of endgame content. To Gazillions credit, they are active in the forums and listening to gamer feedback and making weekly changes to the game. As an example, the 7/2/13 patch fixes a lot of hero issues to make more builds viable in end-game content and removes the Cosmic Key (which is a random drop) restriction from all end-game areas. So while the game doesn’t feel like a complete product just yet, there’s a good amount of fun content here to play now and even more to look forward to in the future.
