15 playable characters is a ton for a beat-em-up, to put it lightly. Marvel Cosmic Invasion pulls from numerous different comics, and many of its characters and references will be wasted on anyone who’s only focused on the MCU, which is either a good thing or a bad thing depending on which side of the fence you’re on. It’s another rock-solid beat-em-up from Tribute Games, who developed Shredder’s Revenge and this game, while pretty similar, thankfully adds greater depth to the proceedings, despite still having a campaign and pretty much nothing else.
Marvel Cosmic Invasion has a campaign mode and an arcade mode. The former has you play levels individually as well as complete optional objectives that reward you with blocks that you can place to unlock extra content. The game has 15 levels that all take around 7-10 minutes, so a single playthrough will take a few hours. Completing all of the challenges will probably take a bit longer, but they can also be done on your first attempt without too many issues most of the time. They typically require you to bring two specific characters, but there’s no reason not to bring whoever you want otherwise.
Considering how many characters there are, going with a tag team system was a great idea. You can swap between characters at the press of a button, and they have their own separate health and special bars. You can even summon the character that’s not in use to attack foes as well, which is something I honestly didn’t use much. Due to the number of characters, there’s a fairly high amount of repetition between their moves, as many have abilities that are fairly interchangeable. That being said, some of them do have fairly useful, unique actions at the same time.
Each character has a default attack string, a special attack (that’s either a grab or projectile attack), a dodge or block (dodging grants i-frames, blocking lets you parry,) a charge, and a super. If a character can fly in the source material, they can fly in-game too, although this really just lets them hover at one specific height. Considering that there are flying enemies and only characters that fly can combo in mid-air, it pays to always have a flyer on your team. There’s actually a fair amount of synergy going on, as I prefer to also make sure to bring a blocker and a dodger, as well as a grabber and projectile-thrower.
Naturally, the above does limit your team compositions. Only one flying character, Phoenix, has a grab, for instance. Therefore, you’ll almost always be choosing a character with a grab to go alongside your flyer. Suffice to say, not all the characters are equally effective, although they can all perform well enough on the ground. Players who don’t care to dive into the nitty-gritty details of each character might find that there just aren’t that many truly unique characters. Phoenix’s grab lets her grab enemies that aren’t nearby, which no one else can do, while Captain America’s shield throw allows you to bounce multiple enemies and use it in some creative ways.
Some characters, such as Phyla-Vell and Silver Surfer, have some moves that add an extremely useful debuff (which Silver Surfer can easily apply at a distance, making him the better choice for this.) Spider-Man has some unique properties too, although they’re not all that useful in practice, as his web somewhat slows enemies down and his swing kick’s height makes it unwieldy at best (Venom’s swing-kick, on the other hand, has a larger hitbox.) The above can make picking the rest of the cast a less-interesting choice, but there’s still lots of fun to be had with them for any personal faves.
Enemies vary between humans, cosmic monstrosities, big bugs, and Sentinels, so there’s a decent amount of variety here. Most of Marvel Cosmic Invasion‘s stages don’t make heavy use of gimmicks, so they can feel a bit pedestrian, but there’s enough differentiation here overall. Especially memorable moments include using turrets to gun down dudes on top of a heli-carrier and fighting monsters on the rainbow-coloured Bifrost on the way to Asgard. One level throws drones at you whose sensors you can avoid (which is also tied to that level’s challenge.)
All 15 levels end in a boss fight, and these are of variable difficulty. Most aren’t too challenging, but then you’ve got ones like the Venom fight that take more doing than others. Bringing a parry-capable character can absolutely trivialize certain fights, too, which isn’t a tall order since the parry window is quite lenient. The game’s challenges are mostly pretty similar. They vary between defeating the boss with a certain character, hitting enemies with a specific character’s special move, and not taking damage from certain obstacles, among others.
The main aspect that really increases Marvel Cosmic Invasion‘s replay value is that you unlock modifiers for the arcade mode. Weirdly, only the normal difficulty is available in the campaign, so you’ll need to go to arcade mode if you want more of a challenge. Other modifiers include taking away your ability to heal, having your special bar fill faster, or, my personal favourite, letting you choose the enemy number configuration between one, two, or four player configs. Having far more enemies to fight like this makes the game even more enjoyable for me, although I wish this could be turned on in the campaign mode.
While arcade mode has you pick which level to go to at branching paths and doesn’t let you do all 15 stages in one run, the mode can easily take an hour and a half. Seeing as you can’t save (and you lose completely if you run out of lives,) it can make this mode less appealing for anyone that doesn’t want to commit to a full session. Anyone looking for a survival mode of any sort will also be disappointed. Much like with Shredder’s Revenge, that’ll likely come as DLC, which is a practice that I sorely dislike. While Marvel Cosmic Invasion has a good amount of content for an older-style beat-em-up, it really should’ve had more than a campaign, considering its price tag.
Marvel Cosmic Invasion really does excel in terms of game feel, though. Juggles and combos feel pretty great, and it’s extremely satisfying to knock enemies around and throw them into each other. Everything is rendered with high-quality, detailed pixel art, leading to some really stellar animations (the devs really knocked it out of the park with Venom and Phoenix, especially.) A certain subset of players will really enjoy figuring out how to best combo enemies to death, and there really is a strong amount of options here. The game might be a bit short on content, but it’s a more-than-satisfying beat-em-up, as long as you’re okay with playing through these levels over and over.
Marvel Cosmic Invasion: Marvel Cosmic Invasion is an enjoyable beat-em-up with great pixel art and a large, varied cast of characters. – Andrew Farrell
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