Weird Designs

It’s an open secret that most of the hype for Marvel’s Avengers was based on the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. At the same time, this was never intended to be an official MCU game because Square Enix didn’t want to pay for the likeness rights to various actors.

Marvel fans ended up being shocked at how weird and ugly these character designs were. For example, they were expecting Chris Evans’ Captain America and ended up with the Dollar Tree version of Cap instead. Even before players picked up a controller or watched the trailer, these ugly designs were enough to put fans off.

Upsetting Exclusives

Exclusives are a tricky business in games. On one hand, exclusives help build loyalty for certain players. On the other hand, exclusives in a multi-platform game are likely to leave some gamers feeling alienated and pissed off.

With this game, the initial announcement that Spider-Man would be exclusive to the PlayStation version of the game made Xbox and PC gamers understandably angry. And the cherry on top of this is that, as of the time of this writing, Spider-Man still hasn’t debuted in this game, meaning Square Enix is now pissing off PlayStation players along with everyone else.

Greed Is Not Good

Microtransactions are not exactly new to video games. However, it’s a constant balancing act of finding what players are willing to pay for versus what will turn them away from the game altogether.

Sadly, Square Enix is not very good at this balancing act. The store offered rotating items to stress players into purchases and players had to pay an extra $10 for battle passes locked to single characters. Considering that the base game is already too expensive for what it is, players understandably balked at all of this nickel and diming.

Very Few Boss Fights

Ask yourself this - what do you like to see from a superhero movie? It’s only so much fun watching superpowered heroes fight normal dudes. Instead, audiences expect to see these heroes take on seriously-jacked supervillains.

But Marvel’s Avengers offers very few fulfilling boss fights. It’s cool to fight characters like MODOK and Abomination, but fights with a generic Warbot or Warship are just sad. And as much as I like Taskmaster, he doesn’t make for a cool villain or an engaging fight.

No One Was Asking For Multiplayer If we’re being really blunt, one of the biggest problems with this multiplayer Avengers game is simple. Almost nobody was asking for a multiplayer game!

The best superhero games in recent years have been solo adventures, including the great Spider-Man game on PlayStation and the Arkham series. While fans liked the basic story mode of Marvel’s Avengers, they wanted a better game built around this rather than lackluster multiplayer.

For what it’s worth, Square Enix seemed to get the message. That’s why their Guardians of the Galaxy game will be a single-player adventure without a hint of multiplayer.

Repetitive Gameplay

Of course, nothing is wrong with a multiplayer game if the multiplayer is actually fun. But Marvel’s Avengers was hamstrung from the very beginning with boring and repetitive gameplay.

Even if you absolutely love these characters and their universe, it’s tough to get excited about another monotonous fight in a generic warehouse fighting generic enemies. For a multiplayer Marvel game, this big-budget title couldn’t even give us the enemy or gameplay variety of Marvel Ultimate Alliance.

Destiny 2 Is Free To Play

It was never a secret that Square Enix was trying to copy Bungie’s homework. They wanted to copy the same looter shooter formula that made Destiny and Destiny 2 hit games.

But here’s the thing: while I am not its biggest fan, Destiny 2 is light years better than Marvel’s Avengers in every way. And the base game is now completely free.

Why would anyone pay $60 for a crappy Avengers knockoff of Destiny 2 when they could play the real thing for free?

The Slog Gets Slower

In theory, there are a number of ways in which Square Enix could fix the problems that bog down Marvel's Avengers. But whenever they go to “fix” something in this game, they make things worse.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this was a change earlier this year that made grinding and leveling up even slower than before. Considering that doing so was already a boring slog, this seemed like nothing short of a slap in the face to players.

Confusing Design

Marvel’s Avengers has many different moving parts. This includes a rotating marketplace, Hero Challenge cards, multiple vendors, and countless cosmetics.

That would be fine except for one small thing: the game does an exceedingly poor job of explaining how it all works. Players who want to get into this game are forced to do their own homework to figure out how everything works.

And that’s a lot of homework to do just to experience such a disappointing game!

Most Loot Is Boring

Marvel’s Avengers straight-up copied Destiny's formula of incentivizing players to constantly try and find awesome loot. Unfortunately, they managed to screw up pretty badly.

While not everything is a winner, Destiny’s look usually does two things: look cool and change the way you play the game. Different armor and weapon builds can turn Destiny 2 into an entirely new game from the one you’ve been playing.

But in Avengers, most loot doesn’t even change the appearance of your character. And often it just offers simple stat boosts instead of major gameplay challenges. The end result is a game that plays badly, while also being completely bland and boring.