Marvel Future Revolution: A million realities and a billion plot holes

Title: Marvel Future Revolution
Developer: Netmarble
Publisher: Netmarble
Platforms: iOS (reviewed on), Android
Release date: August 25, 2021

Last month, Netmarble and Marvel released a(nother) mobile app called Marvel Future Revolution. If you are a fan of the Marvel movies, you’re going to be getting a lot of joy out of this game, especially since you can unlock the MCU costumes for the characters. If you’re a fan of the Marvel comics? Results may vary. Let’s dig in.

Marvel Future Revolution starts off with a really strong premise. A multiverse has been discovered. Yay! But they’ve also discovered that all the Earths are about to collide physically on the same spot. Boo! Hank Pym, a character Marvel seems really set on making us forget is a terrible person, is in charge of a machine that will somehow save everyone.

Unfortunately, A.I.M. is up to their shenanigans and is attempting to save the Earths by blowing up the ones in the way. They steal a yellow canister that is needed for the machine Hank Pym is using, but they don’t tell us what’s in it though. Ever. But it’s okay, three M.O.D.O.K.s are fun.

As the story starts, we take control of various heroes so we can get an idea of how each one plays, for the most part. The game starts with Star-Lord and his headset blasting a very free domain guitar loop (which I’m almost certain is one of the default ones from Garageband).

He does alright and fights some A.I.M. Troopers. His attacks are fairly well thought out and very on-brand. He rocket-boots enemies in the head, fires his blasters and haphazardly throws his grenades about. He’s a great character to help you learn the basic controls.

Shortly after you tag outwith Black Widow who, surprisingly, has quite possibly the widest variety of attacks than anyone else in this game. A game that has Storm in it, who is the next person you play as, who also wields a lot of expected weather-based attacks that honestly look really pretty and really feel powerful. Storm gets saved by Iron Man (don’t even get me started on that one) and through him and Spider-man, you get a tutorial of the game’s quick-time events. These are really weird because they’ll happen when something really dangerous is about to occur, like a building falling on someone or a massive attack needing to be executed. What I noticed immediately, mostly because I was taking notes while watching what I thought was a non-interactive cutscene, is that nothing happens if you miss it. I missed every quick-time event and everyone was fine.

After all that, Spider-Man is saved by Captain Marvel and we get to play as her for a moment. This one surprised me because while I get that she’s one of the heaviest hitters in the Marvel Universe, she had to hit basic A.I.M. agents multiple times to take them out. She just didn’t feel that strong. I feel like they could have swapped her out with many other, weaker, characters and this problem would have been fixed.

From there the baton gets passed to Doctor Strange. I got excited because I really wanted to see how he played, but the game skips directly over him and instead we get a surprise visit from Captain America. We get to play as him for a moment thus bringing the tutorial to a close.

Then a bunch of stuff happens, the machine fails and Vision decides to sacrifice himself, using his density powers to merge the worlds so instead of keeping the Earths safe. As a result, we get Plan B which is to let all the worlds merge into one.

This causes one of the biggest questions I have with the game — “how does that work?” Much like the confusion of when a DC character goes to Cleveland or New York despite Metropolis and Gotham supposed being there instead; we have moments that take place in America, but then moments that take place in Hydramerica (it’s what you think it is). And then other moments that take place in other spots that are ALSO supposed to be America with no explanation as to what the landscapes look like. Heck, Age of Apocolypse was a hot mess but at least they gave us a map.

The game is filled with weird, questionable holes like this. For example, one of the first missions has you squaring off against Ultron, and almost exactly like Brainiac in DC Universe Online, he comes in regular Ultrons, spider mech Ultrons, and larger floaty Ultrons with the occasionally more heavily armored Ultron. But Ultron is introduced as a helper to Tony Stark and Hank Pym that you get to witness turn evil. Now…hold up. None of these universes ever heard of Ultron? Because, correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t Ultron build Vision? How does Vision exist if they never heard of Ultron?

Sorry, possibly looking too into it but it kills me because there’s a lot of things like this that never get explained. So if you’re a casual Marvel fan, this is going to be a lot to take in. If you’re more than casual, you’re probably going to be trying to fill in plotholes a LOT.

After you finish the tutorial you get to pick a character to be your main. There are eight characters to choose from (Captain America, Captain Marvel, Spider-man, Black Widow, Iron Man, Doctor Strange, Star-Lord, and Storm) and you get four slots to have characters in. You cannot delete a character or clear a spot when you choose, so make sure it’s one you want as you have to pay real money to be able to unlock the remaining four slots.

When you pick a character, each of the eight has their own tutorial stage and most of them are pretty great with a high point being Black Widow. She faces off against a version of the Hand, led by an amazing looking evil version of Daredevil who kidnaps orphans and trains them to be the next generation of assassins. Captain America invades a Hydra base in Hydramerica to save the Winter Soldier from a comically large Red Skull death trap — a death trap that would make a villain from the Adam West’s Batman show blush.

Both times I got really into it because the concept was fairly cool. But every tutorial ends the same way. A version of your character steps through a portal, donned in a Starktech version of their famous outfit (read: robotic) and tells them they need to come with them because there’s bigger fish to fry. This part is really weird to me because in the case of Black Widow she leaves the kidnapped children in the Hand base and Captain America frees Winter Soldier but then deadass leaves him behind in the middle of a Hydra base which, I remind you, is Red Skull’s personal base in the middle of the country that Red Skull is ruling over.

These stories never get touched on again so if you just assumed “oh, the kids and Bucky have died now” it would still mesh with the flow of the story because it is SUPER quick to drop one thing to go onto the next without exploring any ramifications.

But those are story problems, how does it play? How does it look and sound? Well, let’s keep going.