Marvel Rivals has successfully landed, following a launch that’d make any live service game jealous. Positioning itself among the crowded free-to-play market, Marvel Rivals is a shockingly complete package, with a whopping 33 Heroes to choose from at launch. Narrowly avoiding the danger of spreading itself too thin, developer NetEase Games has somehow managed to offer up a mostly-balanced, quality experience that’s much more than a simple Overwatch clone.

To get this out of the way, I don’t play Overwatch. I’d wager that over the years, I’ve probably put five hours total into it, and most of that was in Overwatch 2. For me, the second people start telling me roles I should fill, tactics that I must focus on in an online game, my eyes glaze over. With limited time to sink into a live service game every night, I frankly couldn’t care less about what meta I need to be running in order to emerge victorious against an opposing team. Before loading up Marvel Rivals then, I was already fairly sure that it wouldn’t grab me completely.

The first night of play did nothing to dispel this feeling, with Marvel Rivals’ particular visual style being extremely difficult to read at times. But during night two, something clicked, and it’s largely down to the game’s wide range of playable Heroes. Split into three classes: Vanguard, Specialist, and Duelist, each of the 33 Heroes is entirely distinct from one another.

Any frustrations I was having with a particular Hero could quickly be remedied by trying someone else. New characters and play styles didn’t always click, but after a while, I had at least five go-tos that were all an absolute blast to play as.

From page to play

Visually, Marvel Rivals looks extremely high-budget and meticulously stylish. Somewhere between an anime and a comic book come to life, the game’s design language does a great job at distinguishing between each Hero in the roster. Broadly, everything from Most Valuable Player animations to pre-match loading screens pop with a confident flair. In motion, things are less successful, though characters do look great once the action kicks off.

The problem, for me at least, is how busy the screen can get once you have 10 characters, each with their own abilities and color schemes clashing together all at once. You do get used to it, but for a while I genuinely struggled to know exactly who I was being attacked by. Kill markers aren’t quite as punchy as they need to be, and the way abilities are labeled on screen can be difficult to parse during the heat of battle.

Likely, this is just a natural consequence of having the game play out largely in third-person, and in trying to do every single character justice, while balancing how all of the disparate elements come together. On PS5 Pro, performance has been flawless, and the high degree of visual sharpness certainly does help keep things clearer and more readable, at least.

There aren’t too many maps in rotation at present in Marvel Rivals’ main modes, though each does have enough character of their own to stand out and make matches feel distinct from one another. Destructible objects are littered throughout maps, with towering stone columns crumbling after being hit by a stray Iron-Man rocket, and walkways falling away under the weight of an incoming Venom air-slam attack.

These objects do regenerate over the course of a match, but their placements make them interesting tactical propositions, with plenty of possibilities to remove cover from your enemy team.

Hero shooter

Marvel Rivals starts off on much more advantageous footing than other games of its ilk thanks to the familiarity of its roster. Even the most casual gamer out there has some knowledge of Heroes like Spider-Man, Wolverine and Captain America, with some more out-there choices like Jeff the Land Shark being welcome surprises littered throughout the bunch.

It helps that, for the most part, each Hero plays exactly how you’d expect them to, though there are some neat subversions like Adam Warlock playing a healer focused on instant revivals of team members being the exception. Of the 33 Heroes I’ve now tried out, only a few have been complete non-starters, as I’ve been able to find the fun in the others almost instantly, even if their playstyles may not quite be my cup of tea.

Some Heroes specialize in managing character-specific gauges and effects, while others are much more straightforward, like The Punisher, whose move set revolves around a more standard third-person shooter design.

To spice things up, and I think, set its Heroes apart from being just clones of Overwatch characters, Marvel Rivals does feature a neat team-up system. Heroes like Rocket can ride on others like Groot, buffing shields and damage output. Other team ups are less direct, like how Adam Warlock will give Star-Lord and Mantis the option to revive themselves after dying via a rebirth mechanic.

So far, not all Heroes can team up with others, and not every Hero benefits from having others on the field. Venom is an example of this, though to compensate he does earn a massive max health boost thanks to an ongoing Seasonal Bonus. At their best, team-ups can sway the tide of battle. At their worst, they’re still fun passive effects to consider when picking a character.

So far, this has encouraged me to try out Heroes that I wouldn’t have done otherwise, and I’m interested to see how future Heroes will shake up Team Up abilities in the future. This isn’t to say that team-ups distract completely from the very obvious fact that characters like Black Widow are straight copies of Overwatch Heroes like Widowmaker, but it goes a long way to give Marvel Rivals a bit more of a USP.

Pick me

So why pick up Marvel Rivals, instead of a much more established series like Overwatch? Well, put simply, Marvel Rivals is newer, more engaging when in action, and takes itself much less seriously than its peers. Though some of the more niche corners of online gaming have already been crying out for balancing, nerfs to characters like Hela, and the addition of role queue, it’s hard to drown out what I believe to be the attitude of the main audience.

Many characters in Marvel Rivals could be considered overpowered, sometimes you join a team with no healers and get your butt handed to you, but ultimately, it simply doesn’t kill the fun. As the game continues to grow, I have no doubt that competitive modes will become more important, but for now, Marvel Rivals is a great thing to just pick up and play. Whether you choose a ‘broken’ character like Iron Fist, or someone less meta-focused like Wolverine, it’s possible to pull off some truly thrilling plays.

There’s an argument to be made that Marvel Rivals didn’t need to launch with so many Heroes, that 20 would have resulted in a better balanced product, but it’s difficult to say that the scrappy but exhilarating state of gameplay at the moment isn’t right where things should be. There are absolutely some issues with match balancing however, with some maps feeling unfairly weighted depending on which side your team starts at.

Similarly, some maps have choke points right from the first spawn point, leading to the feeling of throwing yourself into a meat grinder from the very moment a match begins. None of these issues are deal breakers, and this is Season 0 after all, so hopefully the first proper balancing patch will help smooth over some of the rougher edges present in the launch version.

Clearly, Marvel Rivals is striking the right chord with players, given the ever-growing player counts and social media dominance it is enjoying post-launch. For me, there’s plenty of room for Marvel Rivals to grow, hopefully with the addition of more modes, maps and Heroes, but for a free-to-play title launching during such a difficult time for live service games, it sure has come out of the gate swinging.

Should I play Marvel Rivals?

Play it if…

Don’t play it if…

Accessibility

Marvel Rivals has a fairly standard suite of accessibility options, though they are limited when compared to other online shooters.

There’s a color blind mode, as well as the option to assign custom colors to elements like allies, shield HP bars, and other parts of the in-game UI.

In terms of controls, there’s very few accessibility options, besides button mapping, and the ability to assign specific control schemes to selected Heroes.

How I reviewed Marvel Rivals

I played Marvel Rivals for 25 hours on the PS5 Pro.

During that time I spent at least three matches with every Hero, but focused on maining Captain America, Iron Fist, Mantis, Venom and Punisher. In terms of modes, there aren’t many, so I tried them all. I purchased Season 0’s Battle Pass, and have worked through it while completing Daily, Weekly and Seasonal challenges.

I played the game using a 4K LG TV. I used a standard DualSense Wireless Controller, with the Razer Blackshark V2 headphones connected via the controller port.

First reviewed December 2024.

Before this year’s Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, developer Asobo achieved something momentous in 2020: they found a way to make a Flight Simulator game feel not just relevant to a mainstream audience, but vital. For at least a few weeks there in that strangest of masked-up, doomscrolling times, we were all budding pilots, exorcising our lockdown cabin fever by exploring a virtual Earth from above.

The tech - some dark wizardry that pulled Bing Maps data from the cloud via Microsoft Azure - was eye-catching enough that even people who’d never dreamed of buying their own cockpit stopped what they were doing and paid attention. The trouble was, of course, there wasn’t much game to it.

That might sound like an unfair thing to say about a game that gave you an entire planet to fly around, and just about every known airport to take off or land on, but it’s true. Outside of a few scenarios and challenges, the experience was down to you to sculpt and define in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020.

Asobo’s 2024 follow-up addresses that point with a laser focus, introducing an all-new career mode that’s so astoundingly deep and varied that you can even play it purely as a business sim and take all the actual flying out of the equation entirely. If you do that, though, you’re missing out on – deep breath – firefighting, search and rescue, helicopter cargo transport, air ambulance, agricultural aviation, mountain rescue, skydiving, and aerial construction missions, each requiring a different set of disciplines and familiarity with numerous cockpits and flight models.

It’s here that the developer can really show you what all this ambitious streaming tech and map data can do. The locations are hand-picked for gorgeousness and just the right amount of flight challenge. It’s an absolute treat and an extremely shrewd addition from a studio that didn’t have to go this extra mile in order to impress. Career mode provides a clear mandate for a sequel, in an age when most simulators just whack a few new vehicles into the mix and tout ‘improved physics’. It’s going to keep the non-hardcore engaged for longer, and might even drive a few flight stick sales.

Failure to take off

Now to address… the unpleasantness. Career mode remained a mystery to me through launch week, not because it’s particularly impenetrable, but because I simply wasn’t able to access it. n the 16 years I’ve been reviewing games, I’ve never wrestled with a launch quite this bad. For the first 24 hours I couldn’t even say definitively whether the game had even managed to fully install itself, such was the labyrinthine mess of loading screens that I was presented with.

On the rare occasion that I did manage to fly a plane in that launch window, I was greeted by flip-book frame rates, random crashes, planes that seemed to have a life of their own, yet more life-sapping loading screens between menus, and poorly calibrated pad controls.

Most bizarre of the lot are certain landing challenges – and this persists to the present build – in which the plane takes a sudden, unnerving change of direction just before you take control of it and turns a simple test of skill into a harrowing air disaster, every warning indicator blaring in your ears as you try to wrestle control of the plane in time to avoid terra firma. Odd and nightmarish in equal measure.

The loading screens are much quicker now. The (technical) crashes have all but abated. But even on my 1GB internet connection, I’m all too often greeted by heinous low-res textures where an impressive view should be for too long. The streaming tech powering Flight Simulator 2024 simply can’t prop up the ambitions of the game for many of its users. I hope that changes, but during the process of reviewing the game I can’t simply assume that it will, nor ignore such an abysmal launch experience.

The first rule of flight club...

Now that what must be said has been said, we can transition back into the content. Where else does the new Flight Simulator build on its predecessor? Well, airports are notably more detailed now. And that’s just the auto-populated ones, not the bespoke ones Asobo offers in the various higher-priced editions of this game. Vehicular and human traffic is much higher, and the overall experience of taking off and landing is much more immersive.

The flight model, too, has had a tune-up. I must confess I didn’t notice this when using a pad, but with a HOTAS flightstick you can feel a bit more detail about the plane’s reaction to your inputs and the weather conditions around it. It’s especially satisfying to feel the gentleness of your inputs rewarded and to fly in a more precise manner afforded by some increased responsiveness.

There’s a ‘but’, of course. Particularly with a pad, but also with a flightstick, it took a long time to dial in the level of assists that made sense, and quite often I was left baffled by unresponsive controls or confusing results to my inputs that were down to a) I didn’t know that they were turned on and b) I didn’t understand the workings of.

To an extent, that comes with the territory. Planes are tremendously complicated things, and my penchant for flying commercial jets only exacerbates that phenomenon. Could you imagine actually piloting such a behemoth using an Xbox controller? What would that feel like? Terrifying. Confusing. A bad idea. Imagine boarding a flight and seeing the pilot charging up his controller before take-off. You’d be getting off that flight. With that in mind, this game does a pretty marvelous job of mapping such a complex array of instruments to a pad and having it feel fairly logical and responsive, most of the time.

But the fact remains that until you figure out each plane’s characteristics, you’re often wrestling with assists as much as physical forces. This befuddling assist situation also belies a weakness in Flight Simulator 2024’s Flight School mode. Learning to fly is the core activity of this experience, and the dedicated tutorials should go so much deeper than they do. More than that, they should explain which assists are on by default and let you experience what it feels like to fly with them turned on and off. They’re not particularly responsive to how you perform in each lesson, either. It’s nice to get a grade at the end, but I’ve been given Bs for terrifying near-death ordeals and what seemed to me to be nigh-perfect procedures alike.

Where I ended up having the most fun was in a slightly less forensically minded kind of experience, not trying to understand the subtleties of an Airbus A330, not trying to put out a forest fire in the most business-efficient manner, but taking photos.

Snap to it

World Photographer mode exists for the player who just wants to take in the best bits of that astonishing world map. You embark on short flights to picturesque locations, frame photographs according to a few specific criteria, and enjoy the views. It’s meditative, non-taxing, and demonstrates what the tech can do beautifully.

It couldn’t have been a worse take-off, but now that Flight Sim 2024’s airborne, the real work begins. There’s the blueprint for a fantastic experience in here, one that satiates hardcore sim heads and aspiring real-world pilots and also caters to casual players looking to sample the incredible tech without having to take an aeronautical engineering degree. Career mode is such a pleasant surprise, full of bespoke experiences that remold this sim sandbox into different shapes.

But the blueprint hasn’t been realized properly yet. I won’t pretend to understand the vagaries of how Microsoft’s Azure cloud data streaming actually makes this title work, but I can categorically say that it can at present be summed up as ‘not as intended’. There are still significant, miserable performance issues even after some emergency patching work - alt-Tab this game at your peril - and they simply don’t let you enjoy Flight Simulator 2024’s best qualities yet.

Should I play Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024?

Play it if...

Don't play it if...

Accessibility

Never shy of adding menus and options, Flight Simulator 2024 has a welcome array of accessibility options that include text-to-speech functionality allowing players with differing setups to communicate, and an in-game text chat translation tool to that same end.

There’s screen narration, subtitles, and adjustable HUD opacity, along with scalable text size. Mercifully for the motion sickness, you can turn off camera shake, too.

A range of different input options are available here, from pad and peripheral inputs to old-school mouse and keyboard, including the ‘Legacy’ mode that uses the old ‘90s control layout.

Finally, colors can be adjusted to accommodate protanopia, deuteranopia, and tritanopia, and you can find high-contrast menu schemes to aid visibility.

How I reviewed Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024

I logged around 20 hours of flight time using either an Xbox controller or a Logitech G X56 HOTAS, dividing that time between Flight School, Career, World Photographer, and the surprisingly compelling Landing Challenges.

The virtual cockpit for this one was my gaming PC, outputting to a 30-inch display via my RTX 2080 TI. This isn’t a resource-light title, but I typically found that connection speed was a greater deciding factor on performance than GPU, whereas its predecessor seemed more bound to local hardware performance.

First reviewed December 2024.