Marvel Rivals was released in December 2024 to great excitement among the gaming community. It has quickly gained a strong rating of 9/10 on Steam with plenty of positive reviews and has largely been described as exciting, bold and fun. Yet when getting down to the bare bones of it, past the glossy exterior, there is a certain familiarity about the game.

Marvel Rivals falls into the hero shooter genre on a 6v6 format, and that immediately sends players’ heads to Overwatch 2, as makers Blizzard returned their mega-hit to the 6×6 format last year after calls from players to do so.

Marvel Rivals clearly leans heavily on its predecessor for inspiration, but there is a thin line between inspiration and imitation. The question is, does Marvel Rivals cross it?

A Whole Universe

Marvel Rivals was always going to create a wave, a huge rush of players wanting to get their hands on it. The Marvel Universe is huge and thanks to its popularity, it arches across a wide range of genres. Among them are comic books and movies. Then come videogames. More than that, several Marvel superheroes like Iron Man or Hulk are featured in casino slot games which are a popular option at high, medium and, sure enough, low deposit legal platforms at legalcasino.uk/casinos/minimum-deposit/3-pounds/ . Of course, the Marvel universe also includes a variety of merchandise.

Super Hero Challenges

A stand-out feature of Marvel Rivals is the catalogue of 35 characters (as for now) and the varying degrees of special skills attributed to them. The roster is available right from the off, which helps to keep the game fresh because of the different qualities and synergies that they combine to make.

There’s another strong angle that the depth of characters bring to the table and that is, of course, rich Marvel history. The game reaches into some obscure corners of the lore too, with the likes of Squirrel Girl, Peni Parker, Winter Soldier and Mantis alongside Spider-Man, Loki and Captain America.

The weapons and designs of player mechanics like Cloak & Dagger’s shapeshifting abilities add fine nuances to gameplay, instead of characters just being paired up with arbitrary and unrelatable skills.

Marvel Rivals offers appeal to all players and strategies, from headstrong brute force to subtle sniping. The graphics are great also, with some creative licence taken on some of the outfit designs. But while it looks fresh and different, it doesn’t feel completely different.

What Marvel Rivals Is Not

Marvel Rivals does a lot well, but one thing that it’s not, is original. Part of that is understandable as developers NetEase have clearly followed a proven model that has worked for one of the most popular games in the world instead of reinventing the wheel. During campaigns, however, the gameplay feels so much like it has tried to emulate the best parts of Overwatch, that it forgot to put its stamp of originality on it.

Because of that, it fails to bring some of its own strengths into the frame, like addressing the imbalance of teams. Marvel Rivals requires almost inflexible balance, with an even spread of vanguards, duellists and strategists. But without enough variety of heroes in each class, this causes issues, because imbalance leads to weaknesses for opponents to exploit.

This issue is nothing new, Overwatch has struggled with it too, and therefore better team composition feels like it’s something that should have been recognised by Marvel Rivals, but instead they missed the boat.

Erasing Overwatch

That’s not to say Marvel Rivals isn’t a refined game. It is very well-made and grips players with often wonderfully chaotic interactive gameplay, bolstered by having those 35 characters available, which allows for fantastic exploration.

It’s worth learning the synergies between players for team construction, as pairing up Rocket Raccoon and Groot for a defensive boost to the former, for example, is where Marvel Rivals sings under the hood.

For anyone getting into hero shooters for the first time, Marvel Rivals offers fantastic gameplay which hinges on the unhinged, because it mostly relies on individual player damage as opposed to carefully crafted team strategies. It is also full of nice, distinct features like rival maps that transform during the round and destructive ones that add challenges on-the-fly.

But anyone who’s put in a thousand-plus hours on Overwatch then loads up Marvel Rivals, will probably forget that they are playing the latter. The trick is to try and erase those playing hours from your head and simply enjoy the Marvel Rivals title for what it is.

A Fun Rollercoaster

At the end of the day, Marvel Rivals doesn’t take itself as seriously as Overwatch, which is perhaps where the biggest separation is. It’s simply about fun, about just enjoying the characters without in-depth analysis and in that regard, for all of its base similarities with Blizzard’s hit, it stands alone.