Marvel Cosmic Invasion's greatest superpower is the sheer beat-em-up variety its heroes allow for

Daily Mirror

2 days ago

Tribute Games is following up its work on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge with yet another licensed beat-em-up that pays homage to the genre's glory days.
After repeatedly playing through two stages of Marvel Cosmic Invasion as multiple characters, this is one beat-em-up that's shaping up to be the real deal.
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If you're going to get any developer to make a modern, yet undeniably old-school, version of a Marvel beat-em-up, it's hard to imagine a better fit than Tribute Games. Having already worked pixelated magic in its own right with original titles, Panzer Paladin and the criminally underrated Flinthook, the studio did brilliant justice by everyone's favourite pizza-eating reptiles with 2022's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge.
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That's why, after recently getting hands-on with multiple superheroes across two stages, I can comfortably say Marvel Cosmic Invasion is on track to be just as charming and punchy to play (if not more).
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The main thing that separates Cosmic Invasion from Shredder's Revenge in my eyes is easily the increased character count on offer here. Featuring a wide gamut of familiar playable heroes from across the Marvel universe (all of them not yet revealed) there's simply a greater degree of combat and power variety on offer.
True, Tribute Games did an impeccable job at distinguishing Donatello's staff's extended reach from Michaelangelo's speedier nun-chucks, but most attacks in the turtles' outing occurred at ground level. This is far from the case in Marvel: Cosmic Invasion.
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The first stage I got to play was a great example of this, following our heroes' pursuit of a street-level villain called Beetle throughout New York City. Swinging across the screen as both Spider-Man and Venom feels gratifying as expected, yet the need to judge the arc of their swing exactly helps differentiate them from the likes of Storm, Nova, and Phyla-Vell, who all have the ability to fly.
Especially when played with another person in co-op, covering both halves of the screen in this way is much easier providing you have the perfect team setup. It makes for a style of play I never felt locked into thanks to Cosmic Invasion's generous decision to let players switch between two heroes on the fly.
My preview build of the game sadly included no story content – outside of character barks – to speak of, but this hero-switching ability I'm sure will be explained in-universe as being the result of Annihilus' villainous acts. For now, however, I found fighting through the city streets of New York to be a great way of mastering Marvel Cosmic Invasion's specific rhythm of beat-em-up combat, which mostly boils down to light attacks, special attacks, and one screen decimating manoeuvre.
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That said, all 15 characters are specific to one of several unique class types, allowing the likes of Nova and Spider-Man to shoot enemies from afar using energy blasts and webs respectively while others don't have ammo to stay wary of.
A modern marvel
It should go without saying just how much of a, well, marvel this game is on the visual front. Character sprites are satisfyingly chunky in a way that makes each's set of animations appear all the more characterful, even if it does mean that larger characters such as She-Hulk always end up taking up a large portion of the screen.
It's the little details with regards to how all are animated that I got the biggest kick out of, such as how Eddie Brock will briefly appear in amongst Venom's pixels whenever his tentacles are prone to lash out and swirl, or obviously on the rare occasion I played as him and was knocked to the ground.
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The second stage of my preview took place on a helicarrier, with the team in hot pursuit of Taskmaster and a curiously shrunken-down Modok. Again, the narrative circumstances for the latter remain a mystery for me, but it was here that Tribute Games really showed off the ways in which a stage's environment can impact combat.
The main way ended up being holes blown in the floor that I was always at risk of falling through. It sounds easy to avoid but not always when the action on screen is this chaotic. Far more interesting, however, were the laser gun turrets that appeared towards the end of the stage, which if kicked in the right direction will automatically shoot at enemies. Doing this helped saved me a lot of time.
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I sadly wasn't able to play as the two most recently revealed heroes, Silver Surfer and Beta Ray Bill, but my favourite two-character team so far ended up being Venom and Nova. Venom proved particularly useful since automatic grabs aren't a thing in Cosmic Invasion, with this ability instead reserved for the hulking symbiote who can then slam or throw enemies around with ease.
Nova's flying ability, meanwhile, makes taking on flying oversized bugs less of a chore, while his energy blasts feel more satisfying to pull off than Storm's giant gusts of wind. Truth be told, there's a lot of crossover here with how heroes handle, but there's still plenty of combat variety to be found when choosing certain team-ups.
If there's one major concern I have about Marvel Cosmic Invasion right now, after playing through two levels, it's that it just might be too easy. Even alone I found that I could mash through most enemies without much challenge, purely due to how overpowered most (if not all) of these heroes are.
Especially when you throw in the fact you technically have two health bars to fall back on, at least judging by the two stages I repeatedly played through, I can't imagine myself ever seeing the 'Game Over' screen. Hopefully Tribute Games has a few more enemy types saved for later on primed to truly test players' beat-em-up skills.
In almost every sense, then, with Cosmic Invasion Tribute Games appears to have very much understood the assignment – at least in terms of gameplay and sheer character expression. Story elements are still being kept under the studio's hat, so we'll need to wait until closer to release to see whether the game has cooked up something new here.
Even without a good narrative hook, though, for friends looking to recapture the days when arcade beat-em-ups ruled the world, Marvel Cosmic Invasion is shaping up to be another solid addition to the genre's modern oeuvre, understanding this universe's characters to no end and letting you feel uniquely powerful as all of them.