2025 is supposed to be one of the most awaited years for games in a long time. Ghost of Yotei, Borderlands 3, Sid Meier’s Civ 7, and of course, GTA 6. All of these are some long awaited games expected to come out, but no one was expecting the rise of Marvel Rivals, a superhero team-based shooter. Released on December 6, 2024, this project from NetEase Games immediately rose in the charts, having hundreds of thousands of continuous players at almost any moment.
The game itself has been compared to another game called Overwatch. I feel like a huge part of the reason Rivals has been so successful so far is because of the playerbase from Overwatch. Though, to many of the dedicated Overwatch players, Marvel Rivals wasn’t only another game like Overwatch, it was better than it, and delivered many of the things that Overwatch didn’t.
There’s a lot of reasons I love the game. I had never played Overwatch, so I had never experienced a game like this before, everything was fresh for me. The maps are fun, and the gameplay itself is incredible, it’s hard for me to not enjoy the game even when I’m losing. Of course, I loved being able to play as my favorite Marvel character in each game, but what I like even more is how the characters are balanced.
Balancing things in games is always an important part. Game developers have to make sure certain parts of the game aren’t too overpowered or unbalanced, so as to still make it fun for people to play. The way Blizzard did it with Marvel Rivals was pretty unique, the key is to not make anything worse. If every character in the game is really strong and powerful in its own way, then everything is balanced and equal. Every character can do things people call “too strong,” and because every character is capable of that, everything is equal. I like this way of balancing the game, because I like the idea of every character being able to defeat others fast rather than all the characters being balanced and taking forever to get to a point.
Another reason I really enjoyed the game is the roles you play in the game. It’s a feature found in Overwatch, but I never saw this before, and I really ended up liking it. You can play as a vanguard, which is typically a role meant to soak up damage to protect your team; My favorite vanguard to play is Groot, he’s unique because he makes walls and can use the walls to attack others. Another role you can play is duelist, where you use your abilities to deal as much damage to the other team as possible; I don’t play as a duelist as much as other roles, but I love to play as Iron Man, Starlord, or Hela. The last role you can play as, which is also my favorite, is a strategist. As a strategist, your goal should be to support your team with healing or damage boosts, and I love to play as Mantis, because she has the most capability to play aggressively.
The last notable part about the game that differentiates itself from others like it is its team up system. Essentially, if you have two or three certain characters on your team, those characters will get certain advantages. While simple in practice, this system does a lot for the cause of balancing out the game. If there wasn’t a team up system, there’d have to be a definite balance of roles on each team, consisting of around two vanguards, two duelists, and two strategists. Because team ups can be between two characters with different roles, it makes it possible to play with an uneven team composition because of the advantages the team ups provide.
Live service games of this caliber are rare. It can be hard nowadays to find games that are different and unique without it being too hard to understand, and I feel Marvel Rivals has proven to be an exception to this phenomenon. Of course, 2025 is a big year for games, and only time will tell how it can compete with a game of its own size.
