The latest Marvel game is a throwback to arcades of the 90s, providing competent fighting and a great cast of characters.
This is an arcade game. This is an arcadey-ass arcade game. It has Marvel characters, a Marvel comic-ass story, and big pixels with Marvel-accurate designs.
And, guess what: that’s exactly what I want out of a Marvel beat’em up.
Marvel Cosmic Invasion, from developer Tribute Games and publisher DotEmu, is short, tight, and moves quick, and is made for the quarter-crunching sessions we remember from our youth. It’s a sidescrolling brawler at its base, but it also mixes in a lot of what made the mid-90s comic book arcade games so enjoyable. In fact it’s like the whole of that era in one game.
Using a traditional genre design, in that it moves on a 2D plane and we’re always beating up enemies and eating trash can pizzas, Cosmic Invasion also leverages the combo systems and the ability to tag in and switch characters on the fly of later Nineties fighting games. This means that each one of the characters is different enough that it’s very easy for us to focus a “main” and a secondary. I experimented with all of the characters after unlocking them, but it’s Wolverine for close melee and Storm for ranged attacks and the ability to fly that are my go-to powerhouses balancing off of each other. It’s natural to want to utilize this kind of close and range balance, and almost imperative, because the variety of enemies and stage obstacles require us to utlize both ends of the character spectrum.
In subsequent playthroughs I’ve been switching to a team of Cosmic Ghost Rider and She-Hulk because the two are characters that aren’t as prominent these days, something that the game does well in leveraging. Marvel’s roster is massive, and we can only really use Cap and Spidey so often. Thankfully with characters like this alternate Rider and She-Hulk and Nova and Phyla-Vell, the game puts them all in a narrative with EXTREMELY lore accurate character designs and attacks.
The game is very much built off of what the team did in the equally excellent TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge but with a little more technical gameplay; it’s much more mechanically sound than other genre brawlers, and relies a lot on how we play rather than just button mashing. It feels like a hybrid between a fighting game and a beat’em up, where moves and blocks and parrying matter, and that’s a welcome addition.
Marvel Cosmic Invasion is a really enjoyable game that’s easy to recommend, but ultimately it’s just a tad bit short and feels ever so small by comparison to the universe it’s based on. That’s not bad for a beat’em up because it doesn’t wear out its welcome, but I just wish there was something more apart from its lite branching path. In a year where comic movies are at a bit of a crossroads and the comic material itself is keeping the avenue of entertainment afloat, Cosmic Invasion is a fun, fulfilling brawling experience for Marvel and gaming fans alike.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the Publisher. This video originally appeared in The SideQuest LIVE! for December 9, 2025.
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