Marvel Rivals, the Fantastic Four are the first step to stop copying Overwatch

Marvel Rivals didn’t inspire much when it released, with its messy character balance and overall blatant imitation of Overwatch 2, but Season 1 is starting to change our minds. In part, at least.

The new Doom Match mode – team deathmatch, but marvelized with the addition of Doctor Doom’s name – is fun, and separating yourself from a full team encourages different ways of thinking about how each character works. But it’s still a team deathmatch, an overly familiar multiplayer mode, and the portals dotted around the big map are pretty much the same thing 1047 Games added to Splitgate. Sure, Magick uses similar portals in Rivals, which justifies their existence in Doom Match a bit, but it would be awfully nice if NetEase introduced a feature that didn’t immediately make us think “Oh, that’s just like [altro gioco popolare]”.

The new maps are nice, if not very significant, even if downtown New York and Grand Central Station are Very similar to Overwatch’s Midtown map. Midnight Features give you a bit of structure and purpose if you’re tired of aimlessly playing. But what really impressed us were the Fantastic Four, or at least the two released in the first half of the season.

Marvel Rivals or Overwatch? —

The model designs are ridiculous, mind you: no human spine should curve like the Invisible Woman’s, and the coolest thing about Mister Fantastic is how little anatomical definition he has below his belly button.

Marvel’s unhealthy relationship with human bodies aside, the duo’s kits are solid and, more surprisingly, even innovative. NetEase has previously stated that it wants to take Marvel Rivals beyond the usual tank, damage, healer triad, so common in hero shooters. It seemed like an odd statement to make at the time, after developing a game with 34 characters built around that exact system, but the Mister Fantastic and Invisible Woman designs are, it seems, the first step towards making that happen objective.

Mister Fantastic can disrupt the opposing team in a way usually reserved for Strategist characters: he grabs an opponent and throws them around, interrupting the attack in progress and potentially launching them across the arena to clear a path; he can instantly pull towards an ally to protect them from incoming danger and has a counter ability that absorbs incoming damage without seeing his own health diminish. Compared to most Duelist characters, whose abilities only focus on dealing damage, it’s a nice step up and certainly raises our hopes for what NetEase has in store for the future.

The best, however, is the Invisible Woman —

As creative as the Mister Fantastic kit is, it’s the Invisible Woman who is more interesting to play. In addition to his standard healing ability, which can also damage opponents, he can generate a small shield that absorbs about as much as Captain America’s. This shield also heals nearby characters, so you can keep your frontline heroes healthy in a hot spot or just put it somewhere safe and let it heal everyone passively; he can push enemies or pull them closer, the latter of which is particularly useful for his main damage ability, which creates a field that damages enemies over time. Sure, passive healing and the ability to push enemies have some similarities to Illari and Lucio’s abilities in Overwatch. While it’s not entirely original, it’s not an imitation for the sake of imitation: NetEase designed Invisible Woman’s abilities to fit the Marvel Rivals maps, and the way teams and individual users play, giving her a more active without erasing his nature as a support character.

With hundreds of thousands of people playing Marvel Rivals after launch, let’s hope NetEase is confident enough to stop imitating everyone else now – there’s too much potential in the game in particular and Marvel more generally to waste it trying to look like Overwatch, and it looks like the developer Perhaps I’m starting to understand it.

Written by Josh Broadwell for GLHF