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

Graphics and Sound

Marvel Future Revolution is honestly gorgeous. And I don’t mean gorgeous in terms of a mobile game. The cut scenes are well done, and the environments are diverse and detailed. The particle effects, especially on Storm’s attacks, are excellent. It was a really good job here.

The action in the cutscenes are really great too. Black Widow fighting an evil ninja Daredevil who suddenly gets distracted by a dinosaur is probably not the easiest moment to story board but the game introduces elements like these with a ridiculous level of detail.

Even the costume designs are extremely detailed. It’s how your character stands out when you first log in and you find yourself standing in a proverbial wave pool of other characters all standing around in a daze. The equipable armor items can also be used cosmetically, allowing you to change the head, body, shoes and hands of your character. So not only are there a lot of looks ranging from Classic to Cowboy to Steampunk to Hydra, you can also mix and match. If I think my green Hydra-cap costume doesn’t make him look like a big enough jerk, I can always give him U.S. Agent’s shield.

The sound is a little different though. It can be a little hit or miss. Most of the voice acting in the game is wonderful with the exception of a few of the Shield NPCs who are absolutely painful to hear. The main characters are great though. Tony Stark sounds like Robert Downey Jr., Storm sounds positively regal and I don’t know who they got to voice most of these villains but damn, good work to all of them because they sell me.

The sound effects work pretty well. Spider-man’s thwips sound accurate. It’s pretty hard to mess up the gunshots from Black Widows guns. But the weird one is that most of Doctor Strange’s spells sound a lot like Iron Man’s weapons warming up. I was not ready for most of his attacks to sound mechanical.

And the music. Oh god, help me that music. If you’re going to play this, turn the music off. A lot of the music in the hub worlds sounds like someone is on hold and on speakerphone with someone blasting a rock version of elevator music.

And if you make the mistake of picking Star-lord, that generic rock music he’s playing as you fight as him is so bad I actually felt embarrassed. Like, when you were young and watching a cartoon with your parents and a character would come on with a skateboard and you got really worried your parents thought that that’s what you thought was “cool”. It’s like that level of embarrassment. If I could pick anything for a day one patch, it would be that.

So, let’s put this all together and figure out what the game itself is like.

The story, the controls, the graphics, they all have huge pros and huge cons. Luckily the game is mostly free-to-play so you can try it for yourself and see if it’s for you. But at the same time, I don’t really know who this game is for. Even as I play this, I keep playing because I’m curious what sort of weird variant universe I’m going to end up in. I keep walking away with questions like “why did we just leave everything?” “How does this world even exist?” “Why do people keep forgetting that Venom and Magneto haven’t been villains in years?”

I’m so conflicted on this one but it’s also very early into the life of a mobile app so I’m sure a lot of this is going to be tweaked but as for right now I’m so on the fence with this game it’s starting to hurt my backside.

Marvel Future Revolution feels like the inside of my brain being a struggling writer suffering from ADHD. It constantly comes up with interesting ideas that it never follows through with. It’s a beautiful game filled with popular characters that mostly look and feel good to play as. And while the characters are wonderfully voiced, they’re sometimes drowned out by some of the most obnoxious music I’ve ever heard in a video game.

Marvel Future Revolution is not a game for everyone, but if you’re a Marvel fan you’re absolutely going to find something interesting in this game. And, luckily, a lot of the problems I found with this game can very easily be patched out so I’m expecting good things for the future of this title, despite my current woes with it.

A currency code was provided to App Trigger for the purpose of coverage. All scores are ranked out of 10, with .5 increments. Click here to learn more about our Review Policy.