(PS5) First Off, while I will be bringing up some newer updated views on the game later on, this review will NOT be entirely for the "Avengers" game itself, THIS IS FOR THE DLC "FUTURE IMPERFECT", while you won't need to see my old review to understand what I talk about, I do delve in a little more into other things in it that won't be mentioned in this review here,
So if you'd like to see my OLD Review, click this link, WARNING THOUGH, It's Not Very Good, and Doesn't Entirely Match My Opinions on This Game Today! https://www.gamespot.com/marvels-avengers/user-reviews/2200-12823016/.
(Spoilers for the Avengers Game as well as the Kate Bishop, and Future Imperfect DLC.)
With that said. Welcome to my review of Marvel's Avengers: Operation: Hawkeye – Future Imperfect.
Plot:
Picking up where the Kate Bishop - Taking AIM DLC left off, Hawkeye (a.k.a Clint Barton) is back after a prolonged absence, rescued from his partnership with Monica Rappaccini as he tries tracking down a missing Nick Fury in the future, and to prevent a world-ending apocalypse from ever happening. What follows is a journey through time, with The Avengers, to continue searching for Nick Fury.
The Original Game:
Ok, so I have to acknowledge this, Avengers has not been selling well, and it's not hard to realize why. The original game (while good) had such a repetitive and lazy nature to it.
So many times in the middle of the campaign where you'd have to go back to the SAME area and the SAME location as a previous mission with the SAME building and hallways and do the SAME thing with a different objective in mind and the SAME enemy spawns, all that with only a couple things that got changed in-between each mission, it was such a disappointingly hard betrayal to see what the start of the game set-up perfectly, get a ton of filler and be brushed off to the side, becoming boring yet bearable because of so.
Future Imperfect:
(Also on a Side Note: a lot of my opinions on this DLC also matches my opinions on the Kate Bishop DLC that came before)
Future Imperfect, however, has almost none of that. Instead of it being a bunch of locations where you get tasked to go to the same areas, this is now 1 big location with a bunch of different areas you're tasked to go to, it's such an improvement to what we got beforehand that, I'm just gonna say straight out, I recommend Future Imperfect, only if you own The Avengers Game itself, it's a decent DLC, not great, but still good, and we got a really cool character out of it, being Hawkeye. Speaking of which, Let's talk about Hawkeye.
Hawkeye is like the cool guy of the group, the one that throws around quick one-liners and makes cool cringy quotes after an enemy attack like "is that all ya got!?" or "were you sleeping?" All of the Avengers have great chemistry with Hawkeye (with Kate Bishop having the biggest chemistry out of them all) even though they're not all seen in many cutscenes together in this DLC, also Hawkeye has a dog and dogs are a win-win!
Clint Barton/Hawkeye is basically almost the same as Kate Bishop (I know, unexpected twist, but hear me out!), now, I haven't read a lot of the comics, but from what I understand, in the comics, Kate Bishop was inspired by Hawkeye as a Little Girl and Wanted To Become an Avenger, but when she was older, things happened, and She Ended Up Being Trained By Clint To Replace Him In The Event of Him Retiring, Or an Unexpected Death, so it does canonically make sense that she would be similar in the hero aspect (excluding some powers and moves seen in this game),
- Both Shoot Arrows,
- Both Have The Same Type of Aiming System,
- And Both Actually Can Use Their Bows as a Melee Weapon,
And Like I Said, I Do Like These Characters, But I Think It Sucks a Bit That We Basically Got 2 Arrow Shooters As Our First 2 DLC's and as Our Introduction To This New Story Despite Knowing Who's Coming Next, Being Black Panther (And Spider-Man If You Own a PlayStation, Though Spider-Man is Gonna Be More Separated Due To Him Being a PlayStation Exclusive Character.).
Also Just a Quick Side Note, Giacomo Gianniotti Voices Hawkeye (who you may know as Dr. DeLuca From Grey's Anatomy), and He Does a Great Job, Same With Ashly Burch (who has previously voiced Aloy from "Horizon Zero Dawn", and Tiny Tina From "Borderlands 2", She Voices Kate Bishop, and Also Does a Great Job!
Gameplay:
If you haven't seen my original Avengers review. long story short, I said the AI for when a character accompanies you on a mission is good yet buggy, that has mostly been fixed.
But Something I never mentioned in my original review, and what hasn't been changed in this DLC, is that, with the exception of a few missions throughout the game, AI will always accompany you whether you like it or not, you get 3 choices to pick 3 characters, and if you don't pick any (or pick less than 3), the game automatically assigns characters to come with you, personally, I'm a gamer who likes to do things alone, and when most of the first act of the original game introduces you to that single-player tone (as well as cutscenes acting as if you were, and with future imperfect's story being Hawkeye centric),
I know this is a game about a Team, but if you look at it from a gameplay standpoint and see the stuff that came before it that introduces that single-player tone, as well as the fact that the Avengers characters have had their own solo adventures by themselves while still being titled as an "Avengers" thing (not including the ACTUAL characters' own comics, shows, and movies outside of the Avengers property itself), that alone I feel, should justify my point.
It just gives off a mixed tone, like someone came in one day and said "we need to make this game like Destiny" (This game has a Destiny type grind system) and then someone else came in and was like "Hey, ya know what? make it like this instead!", and then the studios who make this game kept reverting between the two choices.
Stuff like that should have been thought about before put into the game, it makes for funny moments, but also shows a lack of thought in my opinion, especially since the game released 7 months before future imperfect did and had 1 DLC before.
Also, The Random Character Choices Can Make Conversations Feel Awkward Since The Game Was Made To Act As If Certain Characters Weren't There, Someone Would Tell You Where An Objective Is, But The Line Would Come Out Like The Character Was Intended To Say it Over Radio (just without the radio distortion sounds).
One thing I forgot to mention in my old review of this game was that, unlike games such as the "Batman: Arkham" Series and "Spider-Man PS4", you never feel like the heroes you are playing as, with the exception of Kamala Khan, and that's a shame to say that in a game about "THE AVENGERS", I did not feel like one of "The Avengers", I never felt like I was actually flying when I was playing as Iron Man or Thor, I didn't feel like the ground was breaking around me when I played as HULK or Captain America, nor did I feel like I was being stealthy when I was playing as Black Widow (who is literally a SPY), part of it feels like it's due to the controls (which again, are fine for the most part, most control schemes are these days if you think about it.), but it's really hard to explain why I never felt like that, and I kept getting frustrated trying to figure out the best way to put this, but I can't say anything else other than it's a "play and see what I mean" type of situation...
Don't get me wrong, every hero (including Hawkeye himself) are all fun to use, but something about it just doesn't click to the gameplay style Avengers is going for, where else if you compare it to a game like LEGO Marvel SuperHeroes (I'm serious), Disney Infinity 2.0, or even Marvel vs Capcom, those games made you feel like the heroes you chose to play as in a way that's respective to the gameplay styles of those games, where else Avengers makes you feel like one of the bad and lesser-known characters of Marvel (and they've had some weird ones).
Also, Old Man Hawkeye (Hawkeye From The Future) should be a free skin considering that's who we play as for a decent chunk of this DLC.
I'm also a little bit annoyed about how the game overall has zero to no references of any of the characters' histories, like there is NOTHING based off of The "Marvel Cinematic Universe"(the inter-connected movies) as of this review, and that's a shame considering those movies are a big part of Marvel History, making characters like Iron Man, Captain America, and Black Widow Household names, as well as pushing Marvel away from Bankruptcy.
I mentioned Hawkeye's powers before, like I said, he is fun, just like every other avenger, his powers are nicely mapped to his controls, at least on console, and he feels very fluid to control. :D
If Anything, Avengers is a Time Killer Type of Game, Like When You Genuinely Have Nothing Else To Do or Play.
Mephisto:
However, I didn't like how this DLC was marketed, see, Mephisto, who is the boss of this DLC, is The HULK, but from when Bruce Banner died and HULK got to mature and grow old since Bruce wasn't in control anymore.
Pretty Cool Concept, In My Opinion, The Only Thing is, From the marketing, Mephisto was advertised as the big bad, and yet he pretty much just shows up at the end like "I'm The Bad Guy, I Did This Bad Stuff" and then he's defeated there and then, no set-up, no first meet, nothing like that that came before, he's just there to be the final boss, such wasted potential too, considering the history of the character before his appearance in this game.
Marketing:
Avengers has had terrible marketing ever since it was first shown off at E3 2019, the first full-blown trailer during E3, and every other event that included this game before Big C started, was just of the game's tutorial, but with bits poorly edited for the sake of it being shown off.
And the Betas that released were random chunks of the game that were poorly picked out and without us, the players, not knowing the context of why a certain thing is happening in the missions that were chosen, not saying we should have gotten the game majorly spoiled, but in my opinion, story-based games should not have a public beta with random parts of the story getting shown to us, without context involved, it doesn't give us a reason to care and doesn't give the game an overall good look.
Spider-Man PS4 (2018) is actually a good example of what to do, if I'm correct, even though those betas weren't public, Insomniac Games (who made Spider-Man PS4) created stuff specifically for those betas, so when people did get to play them at press conferences and events, they got to try out how Peter Parker/Spider-Man felt to control but weren't chucked into a random out-of-context mission.
I Think Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics Should of Followed That Format, especially since the Avengers Game itself has a thing called a "H.A.R.M Room" where random enemies will spawn and attack you, but you have different challenges to do, and more recently added, a custom H.A.R.M Room where you choose what will appear, and what affects you in the challenge in which you choose, that would have been perfect for an E3 type of event or a beta.
Next-Gen Visuals:
Clearly, This Game Was Built For Next-Gen, It Looks Stunning Compared To When I First Played This On the "PS4 Pro", The Lighting is Better, Graphics is Kiss-Worthy, Even The Smallest Details Are Even More Detailed Than They Previously Were.
BUT, if you don't own a Next-Gen Console, it'll still look pretty good too. That's really all that needs to be said about that.
My Thoughts On The Future of The Avengers Game:
Now that the game is out on the Series X and PS5 (which I have a review for both coming pretty soon btw), I think there's a slight chance it may sell a bit better on next-gen and boost sales due to people not having a lot of other options yet when it comes to next-gen games on consoles, and also the fact that there aren't many next-gen games coming out this year that we yet know of, as of me writing this.
But Honestly, With The Current Sales of The Avengers Game, it's hard to know whether this current story continued on by "Future Imperfect" is gonna continue past "War for Wakanda", which is the next DLC coming, but things like this cost money, right? Sure, It's Not Always About Money, But Essentially, Like All Business, There's Gonna Be That Point Where Someone's Like "Ok, this isn't getting us anywhere, I think it's time to pull the plug!" as devastating as that would be, something like that could happen out of the blue.
I hope that isn't the case, but if further production and support on this game did get unplugged at some point, it wouldn't surprise me tbh,
However, I Gotta Admit, I Do Envy The Fact That Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics are Still Supporting This Project With a "Quality of Life" Plan Going On To Hopefully Revive The Game, Most Game Companies Would have Given Up By Now, So Points Where Points Should Be Taken.
Overall:
I Liked Future Imperfect, Sorry I Couldn't Get this Review Out Sooner, I genuinely couldn't decide whether or not I thought this was a great DLC or just good, but after nearly 2 weeks of me finishing this DLC (and fighting against my own denial), I can say, I find it good, and not far off from what I now think of the original game, because of that, and how many mixed reactions there is on the overall game, I don't think I could do a NEW scoring that's gonna match every single majority/minority, so let me try something different.
Scoring:
If you own Avengers and are in the same boat as me, try Future Imperfect, you might find yourself enjoying it.
If you DON'T own Avengers and are thinking of picking it up, give the game's campaign "Reassembled", a try or watch a bit of gameplay to see how you feel after.
If You Hated Avengers, THIS IS NOT FOR YOU!
But If You Love It! Go Ahead, Future Imperfect Will Be Perfect For You!
Personally Though, My Own Score For Future Imperfect Is Gonna Be a 6.6/10!
And The ACTUAL Avengers Game is now Getting a 6.8/10.