Marvel Heroes 2016 [Download]

I’ve put a ton of hours in this game. Normally, I shy away from F2P games because they can turn into a money sink, but what attracted me to Marvel Heroes was the fact that you can be completely F2P if you want to. Granted, you still need the time to gather the items needed to unlock things via in-game currency, but almost everything CAN be purchased for free if you put enough time in. The real reason I decided to pay for this game is because of how fantastic the community and especially the dev team are. This game gets more updates and has gone through more iterations than any other game I’ve played. Compared to launch, it’s not even the same game anymore. New heroes, items, and game modes are constantly being added.

As far as the game itself goes, I like to think of it as a cross between Marvel Ultimate Alliance and Diablo. The CEO of Gazillion is also the creator of the Diablo series, and while I used to always tell people the game was a Diablo clone, I feel like it’s evolved into its own thing. Once you unlock more heroes, whether you choose to pay with cash or use in-game currency, you can use their synergies to buff your other heroes and even increase experience gain, so there is incentive to get many heroes. More importantly, they all have distinct playstyles and sometimes unique mechanics or secondary resources, and if you have a lot of heroes, it means you can constantly be changing up your playstyle to prevent the game from getting too boring. This is compounded by the fact that there are almost always server-side boosts and special events running to make the game even more fun, as well as login rewards, daily quests, and all sorts of free stuff that Gaz throws at you regularly.

Of course, there are some negative points. For one thing, the game isn’t exactly optimized. Certain zones have extraordinarily poor performance considering the game’s system requirements. New patches roll out on a weekly basis, sometimes adding new content, tuning old content, and fixing bugs, but it seems like whenever one thing is fixed, something else breaks. The devs do listen to player feedback and try to make sure that all the heroes are fun to play, but it doesn’t always work out. In a game about superheroes, you’ll naturally want to play as your favorite superhero, right? Unfortunately, some of the "older" heroes that launched with the game last year aren’t quite up to par with ones that recently got added to the game, and while Gazillion is slowly updating older heroes and giving them quality of life upgrades, sometimes it still isn’t enough to make them as fun as they should be. You also have to pay for extra stash space with real money, along with certain other items that give random, sometimes exclusive rewards. If you’re prone to gambling or are a sucker for BOGO sales, you may want to take care while playing this game. But if you enjoy the game and want to support a team of devs who very often listen to their playerbase, a few bucks here and there won’t hurt. Either way, it won’t cost anything to download and try out, so if you’re on the fence, just download the game.

I’ve been playing Marvel Heroes since February 2014 and I completely love it. That’s not so say that I wasn’t skeptical at first–after all, 99.9999999% of all F2P games nowadays are either never updated or have a completely “pay-to-win” system. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that neither of those problems exist within Marvel Heroes. Of course, there is a cash shop. Players can spend real money to instantly unlock heroes, costumes (hero skins), and purchase boosts to experience, rare item find, etc. There is absolutely nothing power-based in the store. If one chooses to forgo the purchase of heroes with real money, they must use the in-game currency, which is obtained at a fairly even rate by simply playing the game. It is much slower than unlocking a hero through the store–but it is free!

The game is updated weekly, if for nothing other than some small bug fixes; and the majority of the time there are fairly large weekly updates containing hero updates, ability tuning, in-game events, etc. There is typically a new hero release once per month, and I think the pacing on that feels pretty good. They developers sometimes end up breaking things when the patch. Let’s be honest, though. What game developer doesn’t anymore?

Gameplay-wise, Marvel Heroes plays a lot like Diablo II’s older self. After all, the president of the developing company was the mind behind the original Diablo games. That fact shows, but the game is so much more than that. This is the first ARPG to feature a fully-functional raid–and there is a second one launching shortly into 2015. I feel like this is how Diablo III should have played. Things can, of course, get repetitive, but that is the nature of a hack-and-slash/ARPG. With a slew of playable heroes (40+ so far), there’s always someone new to level and gear!

I’m going to try to keep this (somewhat) short and to the point, so bear with me. I’ve been playing this game since the beta, nearly 2 years ago, and have put well over 2000 hours at this point (the exact figure is unknown, even to me). The game has had its ups and downs and sometimes I feel certain things could be better, but for the most part this game really nails some key aspects of both the MMORPG and ARPG genres.

The development team is extremely transparent and interactive, except in rare cases, and appeals to the community for feedback and listens to what the players say. At the end of the day it’s still a business and money must be made, but Gazillion does far more to consider and implement fan suggestions than any other dev team I’ve seen. They still have their obtuse moments but overall you’d be hard-pressed to find another company that engages the fans the way they do and gives away so much free stuff and info on upcoming goodies and content.

Furthermore, what could’ve been a complete moneygrab is actually an extremely fair and reasonable system. All the heroes can be obtained simply by playing the game long enough and the only things that you’d ever have to pay for are STASH tabs (bank tabs). Even costumes can be found as rare drops, but to be completely honest you could play 100 hours and never see one so that’s one thing you may want to open your wallet for. However, costumes are purely cosmetic and confer no bonuses whatsoever on their own, so you aren’t at a disadvantage to paying players. At worst, a "big spender" may simply level faster than you because of XP boosts, but will never have stronger gear or powers just because they have more to throw at the game.

The Marvel license is used to full effect here, with a huge and continuously growing roster of characters from famous ones like Spider-man, Deadpool, and Hulk to "lesser known" guys like Moon Knight, Luke Cage, and Dr Strange. They release at least 1 new playable hero per month, as well as team-ups which are basically helper heroes that maybe aren’t quite as popular or not ready to be given the full treatment yet. Costumes are also regularly released, and there are even little cosmetic pets that you can buy off the in-game store. During various holidays they tend to run various sales and promotions, hold events with plentiful loot, and basically hand out free heroes/costumes/pets just for the heck of it.

While I think this game has its flaws here and there (they could be pumping out actual "true" content faster than they are, or releasing patches with FAR less bugs), the dev team has done a pretty great job across the board of fixing and improving the game from its rocky state at launch and cultivating a wonderful environment and community of players. Sure, every online game has its share of jerks, but Marvel Heroes probably possesses fewer than the vast majority of games out there. It’s a solid game with a really solid player base, not to mention it lets you take on the roles of some of the greatest superheroes of all time and doesn’t abuse the F2P pricing model. What more can you ask for?