Marvel Cosmic Invasion - PS5 Review

Marvel Cosmic Invasion by developer Tribute Games and publisher DotEmu—Sony PlayStation 5 review written by Nick with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Marvel Cosmic Invasion is a very good brawler that provides a large roster of characters, excellent pixel art visuals and plenty of replayability. It’s a rather short beat-‘em-up, but Marvel Cosmic Invasion is a fun journey that didn’t just rest on its Marvel branding, but actually provides solid combat and a surprisingly cool tag mechanic.

DotEmu has numerous titles from this genre under the belt, but more tellingly Tribute Games has their fingerprints all over this. TMNT Shredder’s Revenge was awesome, paying good service to the source material while creating a balanced, engaging brawler video game. Marvel Cosmic Invasion has a lot of that same DNA, but this isn’t just reskinning the TMNT game and slapping Iron Man on it. 

The gameplay is pretty much exactly what I was hoping for. I could argue that there is a slight hint of floatiness to the combat, where sometimes the bigger hitters could use a bit more umph when striking opponents, but overall the characters control responsively. Better yet, with a roster this size, I was expecting a lot of the characters to play very similarly to one another, but the variety in gameplay mechanics is impressive. Rocket’s a spry little guy that relies heavily on trinkets and speed and She-Hulk is of course looking to clobber people with grabs that turn into throws and pounding swings. There’s a lot of nuance in-between those extremes, however.

For example, there’s characters who can fly instead of just jumping – such as Iron Man and Nova. Spiderman has a sort of jump and swing attack that shoots across the screen. Others like Wolverine simply jump, and has no ranged attacks, but he moves fast. When he’s in close range, he deals a great deal of damage. Each character also has a special attack, that generally hits a wide section of the screen in an effort to take out the majority of the enemies on it. There’s also a special attack button that works differently by character. Wolverine and She-Hulk may grapple a close enemy when you use it, but Nova will burn the enemies with a laser blast or Spider-man will slow them down with some web shooters. 

That variety really plays out in the levels as well, which are somewhat short but well-designed. There’s a lot going on in the environment, both visually but also that you can interact with. By now this is pretty standard fare in the genre, but it’s implemented well. You might see pitfalls when you’re in a helicarrier that I would not recommend falling through, or encased creatures you can free to barrel into your enemies. Additionally the enemies come with a good deal of variety. For the first half of the game, it was pretty easy to march through the campaign mode, but it definitely began to climb in challenge after that. 

Combat also includes a swap mechanic where you have two characters with separate health and focus / special power bars. When characters tag in, they can also use combo or assist attacks. If you save up enough focus between the two characters, you can unleash a really cool combination ultimate attack. In addition to this, characters can level up upon completing stages. They all start at level 1, but can max out at level 10. These levels will grant extra hit points, passive skills and more along the way until you get a new color swap at level 10. It’s a nice bit of progression that when combined with challenges, add some meat to an otherwise fairly short game.

Marvel Cosmic invasion has two primary modes. One is a simple arcade mode with no continues – just the challenge of getting as far as you can into the game with the best score you can put together. The campaign mode is more entertaining as it provides a story, unlockable characters and optional challenges with each stage. There’s a hidden cube in each stage to be found, and of greater interest are some gameplay challenges too. Each stage is ‘meant’ to be cleared by a specific duo for story purposes (but you can use other characters if you’d like). So you might see one stage that tells you to use a specific Wolverine ability ten times, and kill five enemies with a specific She-Hulk ability for the second challenge. The third is usually something related to the stage, like not taking damage from the environment during a specific part. It’s pretty easy to mess these up the first time through, so I found myself gladly replaying stages in an effort to complete all of the challenges. 

Generally speaking, it’s a really good package that delivers the goods, but there are a few small quibbles. I did touch on the shortness already and how the combat sometimes lacks impact, but it’s worth calling out that as enjoyable as the visuals were, the music was just ‘okay’ in my opinion. It matches the combat fine, but the genre often has pretty catchy tunes that linger in my head well after I’ve turned off the game, but I didn’t come away from my time with Marvel Cosmic Invasion with any particularly memorable songs rolling around in my skull. Also, there’s a lack of difficulty settings that could be disappointing for those wanting more extreme difficulty or an easier time with the challenge, making it more accessible. 

Fans of the brawler genre and Marvel IP should enjoy their time with Marvel Cosmic Invasion. The visuals are better than the audio, but the overall presentation is enjoyable. Stage challenges and character progression provide replay value to help counter the relatively short runtime (I think I beat the game in about six hours, give or take), and the large roster of over a dozen unique characters is varied and fun to learn. This is one of the best examples of the genre to come out in awhile and is worth a play.

 

Score: 8 / 10