"Marvel's Avengers: War for Wakanda" Review

You would think that a game that shares the license of what's currently the hottest thing in pop culture right now would be a sure fire win, but that's not the reality "Marvel's Avengers" enjoyed when it released back in 2020. The game by Square Enix and "Tomb Raider" developer Crystal Dynamics was a hodgepodge of a game that mixed the third person bonafides Crystal Dynamics was known for with a solid combat engine and well realized character kits, all to be massively undone by what was clearly an undercooked "live service/loot driven" element that cast a pall on what was a relatively well-made game. Whatever good merit the game could garner with its well realized cast of characters and surprisingly engaging story campaign, could easily be forgotten by the relative broken nature of its live service component. In other words, par for the course for any first time comers to this genre. 

If you have ever played a game in the "live service/loot driven" genre, you basically know the drill at this point. Game gets announced, gets released with a potential good core within it and it's plagued by many problems, spends the next year and change fixing and balancing systems in hopes of turning the ship around, and by the time an announced expansion comes around, the game has "hopefully" turned perceptions around. It's a narrative that started with "Diablo III" back in 2012, and games like "Destiny" and "The Division" were blessed to have experienced the same lucky circumstances. Unfortunately, not every game on this genre can enjoy the same fate, like we saw with "Anthem" which got the plug pulled definitively without making it two years in the market.

Now all eyes turn to "Marvel's Avengers" as it gets close to the one year mark of its release, and with the release of the game's first "sizeable" expansion, "War for Wakanda" (the other two times the game expanded previously, "Taking Aim" in December 2020 and "Future Imperfect" on March 2021 were treated as much smaller scale releases compared to this one), the question remains: is this the moment that changes the troubled perception of this game like the success stories before it, or is this going to become the next "Anthem"? Having finished the free expansion, the answer itself is...kinda murky. The easiest way to boil down this recent expansion is simply this: "War for Wakanda" is more "Marvel's Avengers". Whether that's a good thing or not is up to you.

I'm someone that found himself in the slightly more positive side of "Marvel's Avengers", while being 100% fully aware of where it fails. I was smitten by its hopeful story centered around Kamala Kahn being the key figure to reunite the disassembled Avengers following the tragic events of A-Day. In the 10-12 hours it took me to finish the main campaign, I enjoyed this version of these characters (who quickly managed to outgrow the uncomfortable "store brand" feel the character models initially had coming off our recent familiarity of the MCU), and I was impressed at the work Crystal Dynamics put to make every character feel distinct, unique and a joy to play. While the campaign wasn't perfect (specially when the live service element of it got in the way), it was still a fun ride. 

However, the implementation and execution of the live service element of the game (which would become the meat of the package once the good campaign was over) was not good at all. It was very clear this was Crystal Dynamics first ever foray into this kind of game, and even more clear they weren't properly adept at handling it, while making some bizarre decisions that massively injured some fundamentals. For one, "Marvel's Avengers" 'til this day has possibly one of the worst loot systems in any loot driven game in recent memory. Fundamentally speaking, the loot in this game is just boring, all just pieces of armor (that you can't even see displayed on the character because of the game's monetization being tied to cosmetic skins) with the most random of randomized stats, it makes it not that enjoyable to chase gear to properly deck out your character (to which at this point we have nine), because there is not that one piece of gear you'd love to earn to make your character feel extra powerful or to look cool. Not to mention the game's endgame loop is such, that for a loot driven game to not have reliable ways to target farm activities to earn loot seems asinine. And the less said about the general buggyness that plagued the multiplayer side (like the constant enemies failing to spawn or spawning outside a playable area, forcing me to reload a checkpoint), the better. 

It is to the game's credit that its solid combat mechanics and the sheer variety of the different character kits was enough for me to stick with the game despite how the clearly tacked on live service element would sometime smother the entire experience. Unlocking each characters' full upgrade trees and seeing how it changed the flow of combat was more rewarding than trying to see if a piece of loot could actually alter the strength of my character on the field. The good news is that whenever you engaged with the story components of this game, the good parts would shine. All of this remains true with "War for Wakanda".

If you definitely want to experience "War for Wakanda" for anything, is to see how well Crystal Dynamics realized their version of Wakanda, and their own take on Black Panther, the Dora Milaje, and everything that makes this exotic side of the Marvel Universe unique. More importantly, continuing the trend of great character kits, playing with Black Panther himself is an absolute joy. The way the character has a nimble weight to him allows him to stand out amongst the other melee centric playable characters (just pouncing from enemy to enemy never gets old), and combined with a potent performance by Christopher Judge (who manages to give a unique take to T'Challa that differentiates himself enough from the late Chadwick Boseman), Crystal Dynamics should be proud with the end result. Combined with the bio diversity of the Wakanda biome, where you can sometimes even find some tombs that more than resemble Crystal Dynamic's own "Tomb Raider" work, "War for Wakanda" does justify itself as the sizable expansion to "Marvel's Avengers" that kinda sorta lives up to the promise of an ongoing, growing Marvel experience. 

As for the story, "War for Wakanda" continues to showcase that story campaigns are exactly Crystal Dynamics' bread and butter. While personally not as memorable a story as the main campaign, the story deserves more props for nailing the culture and feel of Wakanda more than it does have anything unique to say in its story. CD deserves credit for bringing in some talent to bring all of this to life, like comic writer Evan Narcisse (who's been instrumental in the recent big Black Panther comic books like "Rise of the Black Panther") and the tremendous voice cast that included the aforementioned Christopher Judge, Dave Fennoy and Debra Wilson, which are all top tier talent to bring that extra level of authenticity. 

As for the gameplay additions to "War for Wakanda", it shouldn't have taken Crystal Dynamics this long to add new kinds of enemies to fight, but now that they're here, at the very least there are enough differentiations to not feel like we're fighting the same things over and over. The spider enemies are a standout, imposing and satisfying to fight that's not just the same "wait for the yellow circle to press the right trigger for counterattack" and requiring more dodging and precision movement. Other additions are less effective, like this tiny robot that is hard to see in the midst of the chaos onscreen, that will suddenly hit you with a sonic boom that blinds you for an obnoxiously long period of time. It's a decent amount of enemy additions that compliment the typical AIM troops that have dominated the game for the past year, but I'm hoping for more. 

The "hoping for more" is probably the biggest connundrum of the whole expansion. Despite devs saying the expansion would add a good 7 hours of playtime with the story, I managed to beat the main story expansion to 100% completion in close to 4 hours, which is more than the 1 and a half hours it took to complete the Kate Bishop and Clint Barton mini expansions respectively, but still a little on the short side. Granted, even though some of the stuff in these four hours included some of the better designed campaign things for this game, it's hard to not say its less than ideal for what the game truly needs. If anything, it just shows what the fundamental problem of the game has been for most of the year, which is that you come back to do few hours of new story stuff, and it's better to bounce than have to continue and do the rotten loop that is the live service elements. 

If you ask if Crystal Dynamics did anything to change the live service system of the game with this expansion, you'll be disappointed to hear it is exactly the same, with the reliance on doing the same Hives, War Zones and Hideouts, with the added Omega Level Threat (what you'd characterize as this game's version of a raid and is beyond hard and not fun to do) being the only thing that has really changed since the game came out last year, with another one on the way. The game still hasn't fixed the fundamental core problem of having a reliable way to farm for specific pieces of gear, and its long climb to gear score 150 with all its characters can be long and arduous enough that it takes too long to reach a place where you can try to get an idea of what stats you want to build up for your character (which like mentioned above, is hard when the loot is so undesirable, and the randomization too extreme to be fun). Close to a year since the game came out, this would have been the perfect time to dive in and fix the game's loot problem to make the game more sustainable as a live service looter beyond its good campaign missions, and it's disappointing to see Crystal Dynamics hasn't gotten there yet, and haven't given any sign that it is a priority for them as they move to whatever else in this second year and to when they update their roadmap.

Whether there will be more to come for this game beyond what this second year has in store is nebulous at this point. Unfortunately for "Marvel's Avengers", they are saddled with a publisher like Square Enix that is notorious for having unrealistic expectations towards their games, always saying their games perform below expectations, with "Marvel's Avengers" in particular being singled out as costing the company a loss of 60 million dollars despite being the 10th best selling game of 2020. The game to its long term disadvantage has been saddled with the promise of delivering expansion content for free, with the only way of monetization being the cosmetic store (to which there are a TON of skins, and most not earned via gameplay) or new people coming in buying a new copy of the game. Considering the dismal concurrent player numbers the game was seeing in the PC version alone (with the only massive uptick coming when the game went briefly free to play for a weekend), I'm worried about the future prospect of content for this game due to some decisions made back then that could prove fatal for the game moving forward, specially when this is a game that doesn't skimp with high production values, as seen by the tremendous work Crystal Dynamics poured into "War for Wakanda". 

Because of the way this expansion gave me more of what I already liked from "Marvel's Avengers" while not doing enough to fix what didn't already work, the "War for Wakanda" expansion is a bittersweet experience, specially with the game's nebulous future. While I don't think the game is nearing "Anthem" levels of "this game is doomed", "War for Wakanda" is also not this game's "The Taken King" moment like what happened to "Destiny" when it fully turned the ship around. While there were some marginal improvements, "Marvel's Avengers" needs more of a radical rework to fully realize its potential, and while this time would have been ideal, I hope Crystal Dynamics eventually gets there. The core of this game is so solid, I want to see it realize its potential and thrive for years to come, seeing as we don't get enough superhero/comic book videogames like we do movies or TV shows (just look how flooded we are of MCU stuff this year alone). The free nature of this expansion is such that I'd still recommend it to anyone mildly curious about this Avengers game that hasn't jumped in yet, or for someone that enjoyed aspects of it, if not all of it. But for skeptics, don't expect "War for Wakanda" to change your establised perception of it.

For more on "Marvel's Avengers: War from Wakanda", check out the stream of the last few hours of the expansion:

70%

★★★☆

3.5/5

Recommended

Written by Alejandro Segovia

Reviewed on PlayStation 5

Scoring rubric:

★ : 1 point  ☆ : 0.5 points

★★★★★: Essential. Basically excellent. Close to flawless. Transcends any minor flaws it may have. 

   ★★★★: Great/Highly recommended. Basically close to greatness. Some flaws worth mentioning, but nothing to worry about.

      ★★★: Okay/Recommended. Basically in the range of good. Contains things worth watching & experiencing, but flaws can hinder the experience.

         ★★: Caution/Questionable. Basically Mediocre. The flaws start to significantly hinder anything good about it.

             ★: Avoid/Awful. Basically bad territory (some enjoyment as "so bad its good"). Preferably don't waste your time.