[SGF Hands-on] Marvel Cosmic Invasion is a deeper action-packed brawler than I had expected

MARVEL’s next game mixes brawling with its extensive fighting history

I went into my hands-on with Marvel Cosmic Invasion solely with the preconceived notion that it was another excellent brawler from Tirbute Games, the excellent team behind the excellent TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge. And, well, I was right! It was all of that. Marvel’s latest brawler is excellent.

But what I wasn’t quite expecting was just how faithful the game would be to not only the brawler genre but also Marvel’s characters *and* its legacy of fighting games.

Cosmic Invasion focuses on the villain Annihilus as he plans on destroying the universe, and it’s up to Marvel’s heroes, both from Earth and the rest of space, to stop him and his insect-like minions. Pretty normal comic book stuff, to be honest. The game will star a cast of 15 different selectable Marvel characters, but only 9 or so have been confirmed thus far. To kick off the game we choose two heroes, and in my demo I select Wolverine and Phyla-Vell, characters who I figured could repesent two opposite styles. I was Player 2 to GamesBeat’s Mike Minotti, who was jumping in with Spider-man and Captain America.

As the demo begins and we’re thrown onto a street level, it’s hard not to smile while the nostalgia bug is biting me. The pixel visuals are stunning, the characters are big on the screen, the soundtrack is perfect (I wore headphones for the first half of the session) — in fact being in a loudish space in the middle of Summer Game Fest and playing THIS kind of game made me feel like I was in my local arcade back in the 90s.

The gameplay is, as the kids would say, pretty sick. Because, not only are we able to just mash buttons and punch enemies, but the combo system feels fluid and easy. Yes, push buttons in order and we can have some fun knocking enemies into the air. But that the characters have such a variety of move sets is really astounding. Wolverine is a melee specialist, and I use him to jump onto enemies and slice away at them (he wraps his comic accurate legs around bad guys and slashes). He’s also great for when I have to take on an enemy that is blocking or using a shield, as his melee is good at disarming. Phyla-Vell, meanwhile, can fly and use ranged attacks, and even teleport herself across the screen, perfect for when I want to get from one side to another quickly or over pits. Each character is so varied that we’ll definitely find some that we naturally gravitate towards and learn to play as consistently. So when we take on enemies it feels much more like a one-on-one battle, like classic Marvel vs Capcom fighters. That may also be because of the tag ability that we have here, in which we can switch to our secondary character whether to take over or use their help rip off a massive combo, known as Cosmic Swap.

It’s REALLY efficient. And fun. My Wolverine + Phyla-Vell team lets me bring someone in close, and then blast them away into other enemies as a sort of finisher. And we can swap at any time, too, not just waiting for an activity bar to fill up. SICK.

After completing the first stage and wiping the floor with a beetle-looking boss and hordes of insect enemies, we’re thrown onto what looks like the famous helicarrier, battling inside and eventually outside. There are obstacles in the way, there are pits and holes we can fall into, and there are explosions and fire — everything that makes stages in these kinds of games what they are. Our final boss battle of the demo on top of the helicarrier is Taskmaster, who can imitate our movesets. Where button mashing is fine for our previous fights, it becomes important to use the Cosmic Swap here to keep Taskmaster on his toes. He does knock us out a couple of times, he’s not easy, but once we divide and conquer between the minions and the boss we’re able to eventually win the battle.

Perhaps one of the more comical aspects of our time is that when the team was deciding on how to let players recover health while in the thick of fights, the developers did the absolutely most obvious thing: bust open a garbage can and find a street pizza or hot dog. It doesn’t get any more nostalgic.

We’ll warm up the street food and have it ready when Dotemu & Tribute Games’ Marvel Cosmic Invasion launches across platforms in the Fall.