The latest Marvel Rivals season takes on Apocalypse in the Summer.
I have been bouncing back and forth with Marvel Rivals since it launched. Several seasons in, it often feels like a new experience, with new characters and new modes. Such is the reason that these kinds of Live Service games exist: if we’re not iterating we’re not keeping people engaged.
Marvel Rivals Season 9, The Mystery of Thebes, does its darnedest to iterate on the formula that we’ve known, with heroes and villains coming together to battle in teams, and to make enough changes that it’s going to satisfy us until the next update. It’s unfortunate, though, that it’s a little broken.
With Mystery of Thebes we’re treated to Jubilee and The Hood joining our squads. Jubilee is a heck of a lot of fun, with enough explosive visuals to cover the screen and give us near blindness if we’re leaning too far in. She’s a Strategist, being able to heal teammates and attack enemies, knocking them back with her Ultimate. The bigger addition is the change to the Team-Up system, which now gives two Loadout abilities (a base and an enhanced effect). Over the last couple of days the game has also unlocked a new path to Doomsday mode, which will serve as a lead-in to the upcoming film.
But with all that content comes a somewhat wildly inefficient, buggy HUD experience. There’s just so much stuff happening, especially when playing on a Steam Deck, that the screen tends to get lost in the non-action part of it. It’s often a tough thing to get through, especially in the heat of a battle. That’s not even mentioning that each of the other modes have their own aesthetics and modifications to the graphical presentation that make it inconsistent, at best.
I’m hopeful that Marvel Rivals with course correct soon (they’ve already acknowledged the issues and are working to fix several) but even those aren’t necessarily dropping my enjoyment of the game completely, just hampering it in ways that require me to understand what I’m going into. Again. And again.
This review is based on a Battle Pass code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. This video first appeared on The SideQuest Live for July 19, 2026.
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