At long last, it’s finally Marvel’s Avengers week.
For anyone who’s been playing the beta throughout August, it likely feels as if the game has been out for a month. However, its official release was this past Friday - unless you count that weird “early release” on Tuesday.
Although hype for Marvel’s Avengers was slow-going at first, Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics have done a good job of ramping that up as release day has neared. However, we still have one pretty major issue with the game - namely, its starting line-up of heroes, and the DLC that has been announced thus far.
While there are a couple of women sprinkled in for what we assume the developers believe to be good measure, the game’s heroes are pretty much all white guys. And yes, we are including Hulk in that group, even though he’s green a lot of the time. Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, Hawkeye, even Spider-Man despite the fact he will only be available on PS4 and PS5. Despite the inclusion of Kamala Khan and Black Widow, and Kate Bishop at a later date, the balance is still seriously off.
If Marvel’s comic books didn’t have a lot of female heroes to choose from then we might give Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics the benefit of the doubt, but that’s simply not the case. Crystal, Scarlet Witch, Storm, Mystique, She-Hulk, Jessica Jones, Captain Marvel… the list goes on and on. Even the inclusion of Spider-Woman or Spider-Gwen would have been a cool alternative to Spidey.
Sure, the logic behind why Crystal Dynamics has gone with the heroes they did does make sense. After all, Iron Man and the gang are the core group of Avengers used in the MCU. However, there was a chance here to learn from the hype surrounding the release of Ultimate Alliance 3 and take it to the next level. The Switch game featured a roster to really get excited over, which included plenty of female heroes. Most of the names already mentioned in this article, on top of Wasp, Gamora, Elektra, and others.
Instead, the dev decided to play it safe. The roaster is an appeal to the most casual of Marvel fans on the most basic of levels, rather than an attempt to intrigue them even a little bit. Yes, Kamala Khan a.k.a. Ms. Marvel is not only a starting character, but the game’s primary protagonist, but did you realize that? The marketing for the game hasn’t exactly featured her front and center. Doing so could have made it seem like so much more than what Marvel fans are already used to via the MCU.
The next few phases of the MCU appear to be preparing to introduce a much more diverse group of heroes from Marvel’s deep roster. Captain Marvel will (hopefully) lead a group of Avengers that features the likes of Shang-Chi, Female Thor, She-Hulk, and maybe even Spider-Woman. Marvel’s Avengers could have got the jump on the MCU and introduced those characters to a wider audience first. Hopefully, the playing field will be leveled via its DLC, of which there will apparently be a large amount.
