I haven't put a video up in three weeks, which is probably my longest break in more than a year because August in Florida is brutal for someone who works outdoors. I got a long essay written on Mortal Shell, Hellpoint, and what makes it great souls like but I've just been too tired to have to work every day to get it done. But I'm back and today I'm going to only take a little of your time to talk about a game that I really wanted to love, a game that has so much that's done right from story to acting to graphics and sound but ultimately ends up pretty frustrating because of the things it does poorly like gameplay. After finishing the main campaign and doing maybe another three or four hours of the side stuff I am more than ready to talk about all of the problems with Disney Presents, Marvel, Square Enix's, Crystal Dynamics's, Avengers, TM. Spider-Man souls separately. I don't want to spend 45 minutes in this game because it doesn't deserve that kind of attention but we'll briefly go over what the game does well and then end up with why the game ultimately is a pretty mediocre experience at best after the logo. Story. I'll preface this by saying I've never been interested in comic books and I don't care at all about these characters really. The Avengers movies were all pretty good. The reason Batman's were good but I also found the latest Superman and Spider-Man movies boring. I basically judge all of these properties only on what I think of them. I don't have any preconceived notion about what Batman should be like or what Superman should be like. I know enough to realize that these characters have wildly changed over 70 years and they've been presented a million different ways. Beyond all that I'm generally a bit hostile to the very idea of superheroes because I don't believe in heroes for the same reason I don't believe in leaders. I don't vote for leaders. I vote for servants. I don't need my president to lead me.  Hashtag no more leaders. Hashtag vote for servants. So I come into these properties as a pretty blank slate. I have seen and played all the movies and games but don't feel any attachment or nostalgia from them. I watched Justice League as a kid and it was just another cartoon to me and one I liked a lot less than G.I. Joe. I've been fairly impressed with Marvel's stuff lately. The Arkham series was excellent for the most part and the Sony Spider-Man game was great. The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy films were really really good. When Crystal Dynamics revealed this game there was some push back when the character models didn't look like the people in the films but this ended up being absolutely the correct call. Square Enix was never going to be able to pay Robert Downey Jr. $25 million to do voiceover and it was smart to just start over and reimagine everyone. What's here is really great. The game retains the understated humor of the films and is of a really high quality. Voice acting is uniformly excellent. I'd go so far as to say the acting here is pretty much as good as the films. Tony Stark in particular is great. Downey Jr. was obviously made to play that role but the game shows that Stark can be played a bit more human and still capture everything fun in the character. Thor isn't a huge part of the game but he's excellent. All this top-notch acting goes along with the story that's pretty good if fairly standard superhero stuff. I admit to being a bit annoyed early on with the Kamala Khan character because the whole fangirl thing annoys me to no end. I don't understand why I'd fanboyism. Maybe it's because I've known a decent amount of people who become very successful in music but I just don't get hero worship. I used to tell my kids every time someone at school starts talking about George Washington like he's a god. Remember that he took a dump in a bowl every day of his life but even her eventually won me over because she's well acted and well written and funny and her banter with the rest of the team is just fun. Crystal Dynamics did an amazing job on the cutscenes and set pieces here even though the whole thing is very short. All of Crystal Dynamics' recent games have had huge production values and have been good action stories but it's important to note that while the story is a fun diversion it's not good enough to justify $60 on its own. The Arkham games had great stories mixed with excellent gameplay and long campaigns. That's not what you're getting here. You're getting a main campaign that's probably half as long as the Division 2 or Destiny 2's launch campaign. The storytelling here is better but that's the only thing that's better than those games. There are very few games that have stories good enough on their own to make them worth their price and this is not one of those games. It's well done, there are high production values and it's a fun little ride but it's not anything you'll remember a few months from now. It is a solidly above average video game story. Graphics. Crystal Dynamics' foundation engine has been one of the benchmark graphics engines for the last generation. All of the Tomb Raider games were amongst the very best looking around when they released and the shadow of the Tomb Raider had some of the nicest ray tracing around. Though to be honest the games lighting looked amazing even without that. So Crystal Dynamics is known for really pushing graphics forward.  Marvel Avengers is, like Destiny, two different games. It's a single player campaign and it is a live service looter. We'll deal with the gameplay loop in the next section but it's obvious that while Avengers can look really great at times it is not nearly as impressive as one would expect. Character models and cutscenes are excellent. Textures are uniformly fantastic and the particle effects are really great aside from the fact that they're implemented terribly and constantly into fear with this game's confused and muddled gameplay. In the missions that are designed strictly for the campaign the game can look really really good but often the missions are dropping you into these large maps that are pretty bland and boring even if they do look good. Lighting is generally fairly flat. Art design is for the most part really repetitive and this bland art design isn't the result of the multiplayer focus. For all its issues Destiny 2 is an amazing looking game with levels and maps that are memorable with excellent art design everywhere you look. The Avengers has a few really great maps but mostly it's just the same forest desert and city streets that are just kind of disappointingly generic. I accidentally discovered near the end of my playtime that buried in the Steam DLC tab under the Avengers properties is a 26 gigabyte enhanced texture pack.  If you're gonna play it by the way on PC PS download the texture pack they don't tell you this anywhere. Now it may seem like I'm not giving the game enough credit for its presentation in what is an objectively great looking game and maybe that's true but if it's true it's because performance. I have a pretty decent PC like it is ridiculously above this game's supposed minimum requirements and nicely beyond it's recommended. I've got an i7-8700K that's overclocked. I've got an RTX 2070 Super and 32 gigabytes of RAM with the game installed to an NVMe SSD. My PC isn't top of the line but it's good enough that there isn't a game I can't run at max settings and get a stable 80 FPS even at 1440p and I can often run games at 144 Hertz with no problems at all. The Avengers defaulted for me to the very high settings and 1440p. I was running the settings the game recommended and it is simply incapable of maintaining a steady frame rate. It'll run for long stretches at 75 or 80 FPS but then it drops down into the 40s for equally long stretches or it'll have just a ton of stuttering. The game consistently loses frames during combat but it also shits the bed just standing around or slowly walking around the main base. If I played for a few hours the game's performance would get worse and worse over time until I have to restart the whole thing.  Oh and the game crashes to the desktop regularly. I had easily six hard crashes in like 15 hours of gameplay. Totally unacceptable. If it ran great for you that is awesome but I don't have these issues with any other game. The last game I had issues like this with was Anthem and Fallout 76 but that's a Bethesda game so it doesn't even really count. This game wants to be a competitor to Destiny 2 but I run Destiny 2 on Ultra at 1440p at 130 FPS with no crashes ever. Avengers isn't a stable polished game and if you're gonna have a game that can't be saved and requires missions to be 15 to 30 minutes long you need to make damn sure it doesn't wipe all of my effort because it's broken. Plus the game is just riddled with visual bugs. It consistently fails at lip syncing and I don't mean it's bad lip syncing. I mean the game just consistently stops making people's lips move even when they're talking. The TV news reporter is the worst example of this. There were even times that the television reporter would disappear leaving only his microphone floating in midair. Freezing, stuttering, FPS drops, visual bugs, music dropping out the game just doesn't run well period. I know that they'll patch this out soon but I'm just sick of games releasing in a state like this man. The Avengers performance significantly hurt my experience. Gameplay. I think I've made it pretty clear in my videos that I am a gameplay first guy. If a game has a good story that's cool but unless it's a really really great story I don't really care all that much. Rare is the game that has a story so great it can hide mediocre or bad gameplay. The last of us games have very average gameplay but a world and story so excellent that it doesn't matter. The same is true for a game like Tacoma or Oxenfree.  Anthem felt pretty decent to play but it was nowhere close to good enough to justify more than 15 hours or so. Avengers puts together a pretty good story campaign that is far too short because a bunch of time is put into making this game try to be a co-op live service game for some reason. It's very easy to understand why they'd make it multiplayer. I mean an Avengers game lends itself to co-op play and the different characters are ready made classes but it didn't have to be a live service game. This game is simply not good enough and the heroes don't feel all that much different to play. Its core loop is poorly designed and boring. Its loop is pointless and annoying. Its missions aren't set up well for the type of game they're trying to make. Let's start with the basic combat and exploration because that's the meat of the game. You'll spend the vast majority of your time running to one of four different submissions and then killing like a thousand robots before running to the next one. The first thing I do in an action game when I get control of my character is run in a little circle. I can almost instantly tell whether I'll like the way a game feels in three seconds of running in a circle. In a fast paced action game characters need to have a very tight turning radius so that being hit isn't a result of animations being too stiff or the camera and character spinning too slowly. Let's look at some very good action games and how the character looks running in a circle shall we? Now let's look at how you run in a circle here. Now of course not all action games need to be fast and responsive. Dark Souls for instance is a relatively heavy feeling action game while Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne and the Surge are all very light and fast feeling. Devil May Cry 5 probably falls nicely in the middle. Combat needs to be designed pretty carefully so that everything fits well. People didn't respond well to Dark Souls 2 because it basically had the animations, stamina, and attack speed of Dark Souls 1 with the enemy and encounter design of Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3. The speed of the player's abilities didn't match the design of the encounters and as a result it often felt frustrating and annoying even though actually over time I've kind of come to like Dark Souls 2. Also, and this is important, it just felt shitty to move in Dark Souls 2. Marvel Avengers has very long animations. Attacks take just a bit too long to come out because animations have been created to look really great but not to feel really great. Punches and kicks come out at a realistic speed and the characters animations look very convincing. This is the kind of animation you do if you were creating a Souls-like, a game that requires precise timing and input queuing. But they don't feel great here because they're a bad match for the enemies and encounters that Crystal Dynamics has settled on. They have the movement and animations of a challenging game against a few tough enemies but dropped them into a horde mode with a million enemies on screen. The game puts a never-ending stream of enemies that literally spawn in around you. They're on the ground, in the air, on towers, all over the place. And that makes sense because the game is a brawler and a co-op game. What's harder to understand is why even the most basic fodder enemies have so much health and why the game relies heavily on a parry and guard break mechanic that don't really work all that well and don't feel good and are in a game where like the parry tells are often impossible to even pick out because it's covered in particle effects and multiple enemies all around you. The fundamentals of the combat feel like they were once paired with a slightly different game to be honest. When you're fighting bosses one-on-one, the combat system here feels really good. It's easy to pick out attacks, there's a nice give and take and a good mix of offensive and defensive abilities. In fact, the boss fights or encounters with only three or four enemies at a time feel great, like a really good game. It's these encounters when it hits that rare sweet spot where it feels controlled and solid. But a good rule of thumb developers should use is this. Either few enemies with a lot of health or a ton of enemies with low health. All the best action games from Bloodborne to Doom Eternal to Destiny 2 to Spider-Man abide by this rule. Crystal Dynamics decided to make even their basic mobs and a mission you are overleveled for take 8, 10, 12 hits to kill and that is a real problem because while the game does have some cool abilities and powers they are on ridiculously long cooldowns so the vast majority of your time playing is constantly mashing XXXY or YXXXY. Almost all of the characters have the same combos, actually I think all of them have the same combos and they all feel very similar to play. And unlike good action games like The Surge or Ghost of Tsushima or Devil May Cry, the timing of these combos doesn't matter. If a game is built around combos it needs to make them a mechanic and not just mashing the button. Avengers has no penalty for just mashing. You can cancel any attack to block or dodge and the game doesn't give any bonus for properly timing your attacks.  I'm assuming that they were trying to make an ultra casual destiny but is that a genre that even has a market? I don't think so. They'd have been better off making this just a badass single player game that allowed for drop-in co-op. And the worst part of all this is the game just feels so sluggish and slow and tedious. By the end of the game the only character I could even tolerate anymore was Black Widow because she comes the closest to controlling like a halfway decent action game. The characters turn badly, the camera spins slowly and is just awful the camera. Aiming feels wonky. Combos again don't require any timing or mastery you just mash buttons until things die.  Just miserably bad. If you're going to make a game like this you absolutely must nail having enemies that are fun to fight. The Crystal Dynamics has very few enemy types here and the ones that are here are all just frustrating. The game already has those long cooldowns that I told you about but then it's constantly throwing enemies that drain all of your power away. That's not even rare man by the middle of the game enemies will just constantly spawn in and drain your superpowers leaving you only able to do XXXY. It took me like half the game to even figure out what the hell was going on with these guys. Enemies power through your attacks. They'll put up shields that failed to be broken even when you use the attacks that are specifically supposed to break through their shields. They spawn ice on you requiring you to mass X to move again. They constantly stagger you out of attacks.  It's not hard by the way. In fact the game is stupidly easy.  A perfect example of how poorly this game is thought out is the heavy attack to break through enemy shields. You do this move by holding Y for like a full two seconds so you can break an enemy's guard and start damaging them.  Remember there are dozens of enemies all around you on the ground and flying in the air so you'll be trying to break an enemy's guard and they'll throw it in attack really fast before your character can finish his animation knocking you off balance and forcing you to do it again.   Again not hard the game's stupidly easy just frustrating. The Surge 2 which is an excellent game has this precise system. In order to break through a shield you need to hold Y for a second to charge up a heavy attack and it works perfectly in that game because while it's difficult to pull off you are in total control on whether or not it works. The game only throws at most four enemies at a time at you. You can pick off weaker enemies first and then break the shield or you can separate the shielded guy and take care of him when you have a moment. In a game with 30 enemies all around you you're not in any kind of control here. It's honestly basically luck. You can't see behind you. You have no control over whether or not a turret opens up and shoots you. As a result of this sloppy combat the game can't have any real stakes. It can't be hard enough. Dark Souls the Surge even Arkham can be very difficult because failure is almost always your fault. The Avengers is piss easy and boring because the very design of the game is too chaotic and busy to push the difficulty up without being stupidly frustrating.  Then there's that parry system. I happen to love parry mechanics and games but a parry system requires a limited number of things to focus on. It's very strange to have a parry mechanic and a game with 25 enemies all around you. You will constantly be fighting like five small minions and two big heavies at once. The Arkham games also rely heavily on this kind of parry encounter mechanic and that game often pits you against as many as 10 dudes at once but those games have a much finer rhythm to them. Enemies don't all attack at once. There's rarely a ton of overlapping attacks and the action on screen isn't this cluttered. Avengers is just loaded with particle effects and enemies and gas or ice or lasers. I don't know if this game started out as a smaller single player game but the counter and parry mechanic doesn't fit this kind of enemy design. Attacks are too slow. Enemies are too annoying. The game is too simple, too easy and too boring and it doesn't even feel like it's working well. The game's lock on is simply awful. It barely works. I mean it literally has no lock on target switching.  Once you lock on you can't flick to lock on somewhere else. You have to just turn it off which half the time doesn't work. It's just broken. It's just a mess man. Finally there's the loot. Utterly pointless. You simply put on the highest number. I never once, never once noticed any difference in my gameplay experience from a piece of gear. Changing your mods and warframe matters. You feel it a lot. Changing your weapons and armor and destiny matters. It matters in Diablo. An 8.8% resistance to frost damage isn't fun. A 13.6% chance to create an explosion on headshot? That sounds cool but either that explosion is tiny or they're busted because I never once saw it happen. The gear is utterly useless and meaningless. What's worse the game literally pops up during combat to insist that you put on the better gear you've found so you're constantly pausing and playing around in menus.  They are like Destiny 2 on console quality menus except on PC. Oh and also everything in the menus is useless garbage that doesn't change your gameplay at all as opposed to destiny where the stuff in those menus is cool. So in the end what do we have? The single player campaign starts and ends with the kind of kickass, top notch level and mission design that Crystal Dynamics is capable of. In between those two missions and afterwards you have a really bad loot grinder with garbage loot. I am a player of these kind of games. I've got over 2,000 hours in the Destiny franchise. Probably triple that from back in the days when I played Warcraft. Warframe, Borderlands, Diablo, Torchlight, The Division. I like all of these games. The very best of them combine kickass, top of the line gameplay and meaningful loot to keep you playing. The second tier usually does one or the other really well. Diablo and Torchlight have meh gameplay but amazing loot. The Division does both competently but neither amazingly. I would keep playing Destiny 2 even if the loot was total garbage because it's one of the best shooters ever with great enemy design, strikes and raids that are really well designed and even story missions that are all unique and memorable. But the Avengers does none of these things well. The gameplay is an average, it's below average. The loot is an average, it's useless. The actual campaign has some really good moments but most of it is just running around doing the equivalent of Destiny Patrols. There's no strikes here, no dungeons, no raids, there's no gameplay hook at all. The story is good but it's like 8 hours and most of it is so minimally interesting you will totally forget about it. The maps and missions don't feel designed, they feel stitched together. The combat feels like it was designed back when the game had a different focus. You're left with a superhero story about as good as you can want, a really great collection of acting, cutscenes and story beats but a gameplay design that's just below average in every way. Sluggish movement, slow and tedious combat, far too easy. Maps that feel like they're procedurally generated and missions that are again a collection of Destiny bounties and public events but less interesting. Making this game a live service basically ruined what could have been an exceptional title. Instead of doing what Crystal Dynamics does best, they focus on the things they don't do all that well. Crystal Dynamics is at its best in the Tomb Raider games, creating well designed levels, a good story and simple tight gameplay and platforming challenges. Those games feel extremely polished and not just technically but everywhere from the story to the combat to the exploration. It feels really well thought out those games. I really love them actually even though they are fairly casual and not hard enough. The Avengers feels like a lot less than the sum of its parts. I honestly cannot say it's worth $60 and remember I am a pretty forgiving guy on price. I am perfectly willing to pay $60 for a 6 hour campaign if I love it. This campaign is entertaining enough to be worth playing but maybe at $35 at most. The acting and story are probably an 8.5.  It all adds up to a 70. It's a barely passing grade, the kind of grade that means your dad can't whip you with his belt but it can still make clear how much you disappoint him. The Avengers is the definition of disappointing. It shows all the stuff that makes Crystal Dynamics one of gaming's best studios but it has none of the heart and craft that makes their games a joy to play. Alright, Mortal Shell, Hellpoint and what makes a good souls like is up next.  Alright, thanks for coming. See you next time. Bye.