Last year, Samsung upsized its biggest flagship phone with the Galaxy Note 10 Plus and now it’s introducing an even larger phablet with the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra. Featuring a bigger 6.9-inch screen, faster Snapdragon processor, and the lowest latency pen yet, the Note 20 Ultra aims to be the most powerful smartphone you can buy for a hearty sum.
What Are the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 and Note 20 Ultra’s Specifications?
As with last year, the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 comes in two sizes. The regular Note 20 features a 6.7-inch FHD+ (2,400 x 1,080) display while the larger Note 20 Ultra integrates a 6.9-inch Quad HD+ (3,088 x 1,440) screen. The larger phone not only has a bigger display, but it also hits a higher refresh rate of 120Hz.
The biggest improvement to the Note 20 series is how much faster the S-Pen will feel as you’re scribbling on the display. According to Samsung, the latency on the integrated stylus has been reduced to as little as 26ms on the Note 20 and 9ms on the Note 20 Ultra.
Internally both phones come running with a Snapdragon 865 Plus processor that’s a step above the regular Snapdragon 865 found in all of this year’s flagships including the Samsung Galaxy S20 and OnePlus 8 Pro. This new chip offers a higher clock speed of 3.1GHz over the normal Snapdragon 865 that runs at 2.84GHz.
You’re also looking at a minimum of 8GB of LPDDR5 memory in the Note 20 and 12GB of RAM in the Note 20 Ultra. Storage meanwhile starts at 128GB for both versions, but only the Ultra model offers a larger 512GB capacity that users can further expand with a Micro SD card.
The Note 20 Ultra also has a larger 4.500mAh battery whereas the Note 20 has a 4,300mAh battery.
What Cameras Do You Get on the Samsung Note 20 and Note 20 Ultra?
Following in the footsteps of the Galaxy S20, Samsung has shaken up the cameras on the Note 20-series by including high-resolution cameras and optical zoom lenses for combined hybrid Space Zoom features.
One change we find a little disappointing is the 16MP Ultrawide camera has been cut down to only 12MP in resolution.
How Much Will the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 and Note 20 Ultra Cost?
The Galaxy Note 20 starts at $999 and will be available in Mystic Bronze, Mystic Gray, Mystic Green. The Galaxy Note 20 Ultra starts at $1,299 and will be available in Mystic Bronze, Mystic Black, Mystic White.
When Is the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra Release Date?
Both the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 and Note 20 Ultra release on August 21st. Preorders for the Note 20 series open up on August 6 at 12:01 am ET.
What Else Did Samsung Announce at Its Unpacked 2020 Event?
Of course, no Unpacked event would be complete without a few other announcements to go with Samsung’s smartphones. The most exciting side announcements of the event were Samsung first 120Hz tablets and a new pair of wireless earbuds with active noise-canceling.
Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 and Tab S7 Plus
Samsung’s flagship tablet is getting even bigger for 2020. Whereas the previous Galaxy Tab S6 had a 10.5-inch screen, the Galaxy Tab S7 has moved up to an 11-inch WQXGA (2,560 x 1,600) display. Samsung has also introduced a new Galaxy Tab S7 Plus model featuring its largest 12.4-inch Super AMOLED screen WQXGA+ (2,800 x 1,752). Both tablets also feature 120Hz display, four Dolby Atmos certified AKG speakers, and an octa-core processor. The Galaxy Tab S7 and Galaxy Tab S7 will release later this Fall for $649 and $849, respectively.
Samsung Galaxy Buds Live
Meet Samsung’s first pair of noise-cancelling truly wireless earbuds. These fully wireless earbuds feature 12mm drivers paired with three microphones. The Samsung Galaxy Buds Live will be available starting on August 6th for $169.
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Kevin Lee is IGN’s Hardware and Roundups Editor. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam
At this point it’s starting to feel like if you’ve played one survival/crafting game, you’ve played them all. The tone and art style are typically realistic with a gritty flair, the gameplay loop is almost always the same, and they’re usually not polished enough to feel completed. That was the case at least until now. Grounded is delivering a delightful new take on survival/crafting games with its inventive creativity and now Windbound is here to blow a breath of fresh air into the sails of a genre that started to feel like it was sinking.
Developed by 5 Lives Studios, Windbound (out August 28 for PC, PS4, Xbox One, Switch, and Stadia) is a single-player survival game with a stylized watercolor aesthetic reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. It features sailing, ancient voices humming in the background, and whimsical themes further establishing the charm. It’s a bit like Raft and Wind Waker had a baby with a single-player version of Rust. I recently got the chance to go hands-on with the gorgeous survival game, featuring gameplay from the very start of Windbound and a midway save file to show some typical progression. Overall, I came away impressed.
Windbound begins much like many games of this type, but doesn’t take long to feel fresh and unique. You awaken in a deserted region of the idyllic Forbidden Islands as Kara, an abandoned warrior, surrounded by stormy seas. You’re hungry and ill-equipped to survive. The goal is to explore and adapt to the landscape around you and embark on perilous adventures. That’s not very original, but the execution is where it truly soars.
Rather than simply scrounging for materials, there is a heavy ambiance of mystery and discovery at the core of Windbound. Within the first few minutes I had found an ancient, stone altar that imbued my necklace with powerful, glowing blue energy. There are hints of a really intriguing story here, or at least a well-realized setting that has room for lore expansion.
From the very first island creatures are immediately outlandish and the game’s general focus on becoming a traveling nomad immediately fosters a sense of constant discovery, which is a welcomed change of pace for a genre that’s usually about doing the same things over and over again.
So instead of farming the same areas for identical resources forever, Windbound requires you to stay mobile. Each island is procedurally generated, ensuring you won’t have the same adventure twice, so once you hunt all the creatures, gather all the resources, and exhaust what’s available you’ve got to move on and continue crossing the Forbidden Islands.
Sailing presents its own challenges too. After building a ship by combining various parts like multiple hulls and types of sails together, you can set off on your own. Not only is wind direction a thing, but the waves can be downright perilous at times during big storms. Battling the ebb and flow of the water, while maintained balance, gets tough.
There are two difficulty options: Survivalist and Storyteller. On Survivalist, when you die, you’re booted all the way back to the start of Chapter 1 when you first awake. However, the main difference is that you get to keep any items in the ‘Held’ section of the inventory, but lose anything in bags. On Storyteller you keep your entire inventory, don’t lose Chapter progress, and combat is a bit easier.
Speaking of combat, since Windbound is a third-person action-adventure style game from a gameplay mechanics perspective, the flow of battle is better than most in the survival genre. There’s an enemy lock-on function, plus a variety of weapons from your indestructible knife to spears, slings, and bows. You’ve even got the ability to dodge roll and be stealthy by crouching and sneaking. It’s fast-paced and just a tad bit floaty, something I liked since it made things feel unique.
Another unexpected standout is just how good it felt to explore and roam around the islands. Character animations are surprisingly fluid, especially while climbing and swimming, with a really slick physics system behind it all that reminded me a little bit of Breath of the Wild when Kara inevitably falls or gets hurt. It’s just silly enough to be endearing but not wonky.
Windbound It’s a familiar formula in a foreign package that effortlessly blends together elements of survival/crafting games along with roguelikes and procedurally generated sandbox adventures. The story is all still a bit of a mystery, but based on just an hour or so with the game I’m already intrigued to learn more and see where the waves take me next.
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David Jagneaux is a freelance writer for IGN. Talk RPGs with him on Twitter at @David_Jagneaux.
Fortnite‘s latest update makes the game a little more like a racer–or a certain other popular online game–with the addition of drivable cars. The update adds four new vehicles, and a trailer shows how they can be used for some wild battles.
There are four cars in all: the Islander Prevalent, Victor Motors Whiplash, OG Bear, and Titano Mudflap. You can find gas pumps or refillable gas cans around the island to keep your motor running and head out on the highway. Plus you can play music from your car using one of the new radio stations.
Epic has been teasing the update with a look at some of the different cars and trucks, starting with the Whiplash. The options already run the gamut with a handful of road-ready racers, but the studio could always add more if the feature is a hit.
Mortal Shell, the Souls-like game from new developer Cold Symmetry, has finally set its release date after completing its public beta last month. The full game will be available on August 18, on both PC and consoles.
While the beta was only available on Epic Games Store on PC, the full game is also available on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and all will launch at the same time. A Steam version for PC will be made available, but not until later in 2021.
The game, created by a small team, is priced at $29.99/£24.99, and so comes in at a cheaper price point.
Mortal Shell takes a lot of inspiration from Dark Souls, both in its mechanics and its grim-dark aesthetics. But despite those similarities, Mitchell explained in our preview that Mortal Shell has its own voice and personality, even if it does lean into the format established by From Software.
Despite the fact that the PS5 is looming, the PS4 has had a banner year when it comes to exclusive games, with hit titles like Final Fantasy VII Remake, Ghost of Tsushima, and The Last of Us Part II releasing all in the span of a few months. Given the wealth of great new games already in 2020, it’s understandable if you haven’t grabbed all of the must-play new PS4 titles. And if that’s the case for you with Final Fantasy VII Remake, you’re in luck. Final Fantasy VII Remake is on sale for $40–its best price yet–at Amazon, Best Buy, and GameStop.
If you prefer a digital copy, the PlayStation Store is selling Final Fantasy VII Remake for $39.59 until August 19. GameStop’s deal also ends August 19, so it’s safe to assume Amazon and Best Buy will likely have FFVII Remake for $40 until then as well. Those who already own the base game can purchase the Digital Deluxe Upgrade for $13.20, down from $20. It comes with a digital art book, mini-soundtrack, Cactuar Summon Materia, and Carbuncle Summon Materia.
For the next two weeks, you can save $20 on Final Fantasy VII Remake.
The long-anticipated remake of one of the most iconic JRPGs of all time earned a rare 10/10 in GameSpot’s Final Fantasy VII Remake review, with managing editor Tamoor Hussain praising the reworked combat system, deftly told story, and modernized version of Midgar.
“Regardless of your history with the original game, Final Fantasy VII Remake is an astounding achievement,” Hussain wrote. “The wait for its release was a long one, but in gameplay, story, characters, and music, it delivers–the wait was worth it. For first-time players, it’s an opportunity to understand why Final Fantasy VII is held in such high regard. It’s the chance to experience a multifaceted story that grapples with complex subject matter, be in the company of memorable characters, and be moved by their plight. For returning fans, this isn’t the Final Fantasy VII your mind remembers, it’s the one your heart always knew it to be.”
Though just the first part of the Final Fantasy VII story, the remake offers a full-length experience of around 40 hours. Square Enix recently confirmed that part two of the remake is in full development and will be released “as soon as possible.”
A bunch of 4K UHD and Blu-ray collections and special editions have popped up for preorder in recent weeks. Better yet, some of them are available at significant discounts below the MSRP. We thought now would be a good time to round them all up in one place. From Game of Thrones on 4K UHD to Back to the Future and Princess Mononoke, these collections and special editions are all shipping in the coming months.
And thanks to the Amazon preorder guarantee, if you preorder one of these sets and the price drops lower before it ships, you’ll pay the lowest price it drops to, even if it goes back up prior to release.
Marvel’s Avengers seems to be trying a little too hard to please everyone. It’s both a set-piece driven, action-packed, explosive single-player adventure, while also balancing an intrinsically tied cooperative mode with a complex loot system at its core. Its seasoned cast of voice-talent does a tremendous job breathing new life into these familiar characters, and the overall story benefits from it. The combat is mostly fun and flashy, though sometimes a little too frantic. But while some folks may be hungry for a fully fleshed out campaign with interesting characters and varied missions, others may be looking for a looter-shooter- style grind- fest with friends. After playing the beta, I’m currently a bit concerned Marvel’s Avengers may not be able to satisfy either craving.
The beta’s opening Golden Gate Bridge mission is the one we’ve all seen, but it’s fun, bombastic, and introduces you to each Avenger. It’s a great opener and sets the tone for how wild this game can be. The second available mission sees Ms. Marvel and Hulk infiltrating an AIM base housed in a very nice-looking overgrown jungle area. It slows things way down, giving Kamala and Bruce a chance to banter and build their characters. Kamala is the spunky Avenger super-fan who is stoked to be on these missions, while Bruce takes on more of the mentor role. I hate to say that I got The Last of Us vibes, possibly because Bruce is played by Troy Baker, but I got The Last of Us vibes.
The third mission, however, is what worries me about what the full campaign could end up becoming. It’s labeled as a story mission but is more of an introduction to the multiplayer than anything. It’s another infiltration mission, but you get to choose who you play as this time around, and unfortunately, all those tailored character moments vanish as both Hulk and Ms. Marvel become more like blank avatars to get you through the mission. It’s unfortunate, and I’m not necessarily harping on the idea of these smaller multiplayer-style missions being sprinkled into the campaign. I just loved the well-acted character moments more, and I hope those persist throughout the campaign.
Once you’ve completed the three-story missions available, the War Table opens up, giving you a full array of multiplayer missions to take on to power up your heroes. They vary slightly, but most involve infiltrating a building and killing waves of enemies while performing tasks such as standing on control points or destroying data servers. While they got repetitive fairly quickly, switching up my hero choices would often breathe new life into them. For now, the heroes are varied enough to be unique.
Each Avenger is equipped with three special abilities that run on a cooldown. The way each hero dodges or blocks also adds an element of strategy I didn’t expect at first. While someone like Iron Man will simply dodge incoming enemy attacks, Ms. Marvel will instead opt to push the enemy with her giant polymorphed hands. Playing as Black Widow, you can time dodges to unleash unlocked abilities or even counter an enemy with well-timed parries. The real fun comes from picking the character that suits your playstyle. I started with Black Widow but felt the combat was a bit too frantic to get the most out of her, so I instead switched to Iron Man who takes on a more ranged approach. Luckily you can switch out your hero as often as you’d like in between missions, allowing you to hone in on who fits you best. Keep in mind, though, that if you do switch out your character to one that’s not been leveled up, you may need to lower the difficulty or choose easier missions until that hero gets up to snuff.
The thrill of battling through these missions over and over can dry up quickly though when repeatedly taking them on alone. I hesitate to use the word mindless, but I did find myself zoning out quite a bit while taking down the same giant robot walker for the fourth time. In the first mission, Iron Man quips, “Which one of you B-movie extras am I taking down first?”– the self-awareness is glowing. Luckily, playing with friends while chatting on a headset improves the experience, as with any loot grinder. There is an added layer of joy that comes from not only fighting alongside heroes you know and recognize but also being able to joke about your friend’s Hulk stealing your kills with his giant rock throws. I just hope the mission variety improves when the full game arrives. Right now we’re either taking down the same waves of enemies, standing on a waypoint, or destroying a waypoint.
That said, there are a few drawbacks to the overall multiplayer system. First off, you can’t double up on heroes. While this makes sense on paper, in reality, it means there will need to be some discussions if you plan on teaming up with your same group of friends, which can be an issue if some of your heroes aren’t as leveled up as others. There’s the scary potential scenario where you’ve built up an amazing Black Widow, but it turns out the main character of a person you want to play with down the line is also Black Widow, forcing one of you to switch to a less powerful alternate. Of course, a worse long-term problem that will need to be solved: what happens when a new DLC character is released, and everyone wants to try them out at the same time?
Conversely, as fun as it is to team up with your friends and take on missions, it can be almost equally as frustrating when matchmaking with random folks. Marvel’s Avengers offers nothing in the way of communicating with your fellow heroes if they’re not wearing a chat headset – there’s no ping system, minimap, or teammate indicator. And since a lot of these infiltration missions begin in wide-open areas, losing track of your no-voice-chat teammate is bound to happen. When you’re stuck on the ground as Ms. Marvel and your random teammate is zooming around as Iron Man, odds are great that you’re going to lose each other quickly, with no real way to communicate what each other is up to.
But Marvel’s Avengers’ most glaring issue, at least during the beta is its gear system. The real draw to get people to grind these endless war zones is the chance to loot something great, and so far, I haven’t cared about a single thing that’s dropped for me. First off, none of it changes the actual look or feel of your character. Every item is an invisible piece that just counts up to an overall gear score. You may find a pair of gloves that slightly improve your normal attacks, but most of these just offer elemental bonuses and are almost invisible in the actual gameplay. When your gear screen has a button you can press to just automatically equip the highest-numbered gear you have, it makes it seem as though there are few meaningful choices to be made. Everything drives to a single power level number, and when so many games have solved this uninteresting way to sort through loot, it’s a tad disappointing to feel like you’ve gone back in time.
Marvel’s Avengers has a long way to go. The story and characters are interesting, and I actually can’t wait to see it through. The campaign missions in this beta seemed varied enough, and hopefully, that keeps up. And while live-service games often come with the adage of “it’s not how they launch, it’s what they become,” I’m worried that there’s currently very little that would keep my interest to play past the campaign. With a slew of promised, completely free updates, and a nearly limitless amount of source material to make additional content from, Marvel’s Avengers could end up being great – or it could very quickly get Thanos-snapped from its community’s mind.
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Mark Medina is an Editorial Producer at IGN. You can follow him on Twitter here.
Marvel’s Avengers has been commonly compared to Destiny, and it’s a pretty apt comparison as far as progression is concerned. A fair bit of how you progress in the game and grow stronger is through the acquisition of higher-tier loot. But that’s not the only way that Marvel’s Avengers tracks your progress–it’s one of four tracks that you’ll need to stay on top of to curate your perfect Avenger.
We’ve played the beta extensively and have a detailed breakdown of how progression works in Marvel’s Avengers. We’re specifically looking at character progression, as story progression is far easier to understand. Early on in Marvel’s Avengers, JARVIS will inform you that all missions on your War Table that are marked as part of the Reassemble storyline will contribute to your progression through the main campaign. Just keep beating those single-player missions and you’ll complete the story.
In our Marvel’s Avengers beta impressions, editor Phil Hornshaw wrote about how combat and teamwork-focused gameplay in the beta is somewhat fun, while pointing out that there are flaws in both the environmental design and grind for new gear.
Character Level
As you complete missions, the character that you are specifically using will earn experience. With enough experience, you’ll level up–this number has little bearing on how strong a character is. Your level simply marks how many skill points you have.
You invest these skill points into a character’s skill tree. At the outset, all characters have a light attack, heavy attack, long-range attack, special ability, dodge, and three unique hero abilities. All of these moves can be evolved via a character’s respective skill tree.
For example, unlocking Whirling Tempest for Iron Man transforms his heavy attack while lasers are equipped, adding a fast offensive move to his arsenal that allows him to more easily stun enemies. This attack will only grow stronger if you increase Iron Man’s power level though.
Power Level
This is the number that has a much more significant impact on a character’s strength. It is dependent on which gear that a character has equipped–a character with power level 15 gear is going to be stronger than one with power level 10. The number isn’t everything, however.
Similar to other loot-based games, different gear can have unique effects, such as making your character more resistant to cold, with the power of the effect tied to the rarity of the piece of gear. Gear comes in six levels: from least to most rare, it’s common, uncommon, rare, epic, legendary, and exotic. So a power level 10 rare piece of gear might have a more desirable effect than a level 15 uncommon piece of gear.
That said, the early levels of Marvel’s Avengers are at least designed to encourage you to just keep chasing higher power levels. At some point in the campaign (likely towards the endgame), you’ll probably have to start investing in-game resources towards boosting low power level gear that has desirable effects. But early on, it’s definitely all about just increasing that overall power level; special effects be damned.
Challenge Cards
Do you like battle passes? We really hope so, because Marvel’s Avengers has one for each character–they’re called challenge cards. All of the challenge card tracks in the beta are marked as “free,” in that you unlock their rewards by earning enough points without having to pay real world cash. This seems to imply that there is a track that will not be free, but if that’s the case, it’s not in the beta.
If you’ve played a game with a battle pass before, you know what to expect with challenge cards. By completing daily and weekly challenges, you earn points towards unlocking tiers in the challenge card. With each tier, you earn a new reward–stuff like hero costumes, emotes, and in-game currency.
Each hero has their own set of daily and weekly challenges, so if you want to earn the rewards for multiple characters, you’ll have to switch between who you’re playing as between missions. You can’t play as Black Widow and complete a challenge to defeat a certain number of enemies for Ms. Marvel, for instance. Our advice? Pick the one character you like the most and focus on them in order to avoid burning yourself out on completing tasks for multiple character challenge cards.
In-Game Currency
And finally there’s in-game currency, of which there are two: Units and Credits. Both are used to purchase cosmetics, but while Units are exclusively used for in-game marketplaces, Credits are tied to Marvel’s Avengers’ online marketplace.
Basically, you use Units for something like buying a challenge card tier if you don’t want to unlock it via completing challenges (or maybe you just don’t have the time) while you would use Credits for something like a costume pack. As far as we can tell, Units are a lot easier to earn than Credits–you can only earn Credits through certain challenge card tiers, similarly to Apex Coins in Apex Legends (which makes us think that Credits are likely tied to microtransactions).
During the beta, we could not find a way to boost your character’s strength through the use of Units or Credits. So you don’t have to worry about the game trying to encourage you to buy your way to success (if either currency is tied to microtransactions). But you should still be working towards acquiring both currencies–at the very least, you’ll likely need to rely on earning Units to unlock the challenge cards of the heroes you don’t regularly play as.
Even having played Marvel’s Avengers last year, spending more time talking about the game, watching new trailers and the Wartable stream, it’s been hard to get an overall sense of the melee-focused action-adventure game. We know it has a lot of characters, we know it has an involved single-player story campaign, and we know it has a live game-style gear grind, but getting a handle on how those things will work together in moment-to-moment play has been difficult.
After playing an early look at the Marvel’s Avengersbeta, the whole picture is starting to make more sense. My earlier comparison of Marvel’s Spider-Man meets Destiny 2 holds up in a broad sense, but it’s not the whole story. The beta displayed how playing as each of the different characters will be a distinct experience, how you’ll bring the Avengers together to form a team, and how getting good with just one or a handful of characters will likely elevate the experience significantly–especially with other players.
The early portion of the beta takes you through a few story missions, giving a very broad look at the tale we’ll be seeing in the full game. As we’ve known for a year now, the game opens with a big battle on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, which culminates in the Chimera, the Avengers’ helicarrier, and its newfangled reactor exploding. That event (apparently) kills Captain America and a whole bunch of people in San Francisco, while spreading a disease throughout the country (and maybe the world) that turns people into Inhumans: essentially, they get sick and sometimes die, but if they survive, they get superpowers.
After such a massive and public failure, the Avengers disband and are slowly replaced by AIM, a science-minded corporation that builds all kinds of evil things, including combat robots and weapons. AIM, of course, is a supervillain organization from the Marvel comics, and as it gets more power, things get more authoritarian. The company seems to be rounding up Inhumans to experiment on them, and in the early going of the story, AIM is focused on creating a “cure” to return those people to normal. Although that sounds appealing to people whose lives have been upended by their new super-ness, we can assume there are more nefarious goals underlying the seemingly virtuous ones. In any event, it does seem that AIM is torturing Inhumans with these experiments that are administered against their will.
Enter Kamala Khan, an Avengers superfan who becomes one of these new Inhumans, later taking on the mantle of Ms. Marvel. Though we skip the story portions that introduce her and explain what she’s up to, we can gather that Kamala is the force that’s trying to reassemble the Avengers to fight AIM. We start the campaign with Kamala and Hulk working to try to find Iron Man’s whereabouts by raiding an old Stark vault turned AIM facility, which is full of both enemies and Marvel Easter eggs. As you go through the story campaign, it seems that you’ll be recruiting more and more characters to your expanding Avengers roster, and playing through missions specifically geared toward each one.
It’s these closer looks at the characters that our hands-on time with Marvel’s Avengers has been lacking up until now. We’ve seen the battle on the Golden Gate Bridge a few times, and that mission quickly takes you through controlling each of the core Avengers to try them out. But we haven’t seen what really makes each character distinct–especially because every character has the same basic control scheme and base set of moves. There’s a light melee attack, a heavy attack, a ranged attack, a dodge, and a parry, plus distinct special and ultimate moves with cooldown timers. What the beta finally showcases is the nuance that developer Crystal Dynamics has managed to bake into that set of moves for each of the characters and how they can complement each other.
Avengers Assemble
As you work through the beta, you eventually get a chance to take control of four of Avengers’ playable characters: the Incredible Hulk, Ms. Marvel, Black Widow, and Iron Man. Though their core controls are the same, understanding each characters’ strengths and role on the team is actually essential to playing them well. Each character has something called Intrinsic Energy, a meter that fills up under different circumstances: for some characters, it recharges over time, while others fill it by busting heads.
Intrinsic Energy works to develop each character’s specific focus in combat, informing how you play with them. Hulk, for instance, uses his Intrinsic Energy (dubbed Rage) to refill his health meter as he damages enemies, incentivizing you to just storm through a battle, crushing everything in your path with no regard for defense.
Played well, using not just Hulk’s moves but his Intrinsic Energy too, turns him into your team’s rampaging tank, engaging either big enemies or groups and keeping them distracted. Ms. Marvel’s moves are largely sweeping melee attacks, thanks to her limb-stretching powers, and using her Intrinsic Energy makes her grow a little larger, so her moves stretch farther and do more damage. That makes her great for crowd control and beating up enemies while staying relatively clear of danger. Iron Man channels his Intrinsic Energy to fire his repulsors and counter incoming enemy attacks, converting them into an area-of-effect blast and providing a good reason for him to mix it up with multiple enemies, rather than just float on the edges of a fight and snipe. Black Widow is great at tying up and juggling enemies or knocking them off her feet, and her energy powers a grappling hook that lets you zip around the battlefield to bring the fight to unsuspecting opponents or to get out of harm’s way.
Before you really understand what each character is good at and how to use them effectively, they can feel flaily and ineffectual. Iron Man has a bunch of long-range gun-type abilities, for instance, but it can be tough to be precise in the middle of a big fight–until you realize that you can use his flight capabilities to quickly get around, drop into a battle, and chain his punches together with rockets and lasers for some great hit-and-run attacks. Hulk seems unfocused and unwieldy until you stop worrying and just start plowing through baddies to regain health, recognizing that a more important aspect of your job might be to sew chaos, absorb damage, and smash stuff in a general sense. Getting a grip on each of the characters takes a bit of time during the beta, but the longer you spend with one, the more it’s possible to see how Avengers is adding depth to its melee system by making its characters distinct in ways that aren’t always immediately obvious when you first pick it up.
That’s expanded by each character’s relatively deep skill tree, where you can unlock a bunch of new moves across various categories. Unlocking new skills greatly expands on each character’s movesets, and allows you to tune them toward your playstyle. With Iron Man, for example, you can prioritize unlocking both a rocket launcher and a laser beam in addition to his repulsor blasts, giving him more ranged options that you can switch between as the situation warrants. With Ms. Marvel, you can prioritize light attacks for hitting lots of enemies at once, or heavy attacks that let you deal more damage to a specific enemy. How you spec out your characters quickly starts to make them feel more specialized, encouraging you to pay attention to developing combos and controlling the battlefield, both alone and with other people on your team.
Teaming Up
Most of the beta was made up of the kind of repeatable team missions you’ll go on as part of the live game side of Marvel’s Avengers. All of these missions in the beta required a team of four, allowing for matchmaking with up to three other players or filling the slots with AI-controlled heroes if you want to play alone. The missions available in the beta ran a fair gamut, from quick brawls with a few waves of AIM enemies, to more involved missions in which you would hunt down a specific target or group of baddies, to fights where the Avengers needed to hold a specific location against waves of opponents. There was also one Hulk-specific character mission that expanded his personal story and a lengthy mission that culminated in a big boss fight against a giant insectile mech.
The missions either pop you into an enclosed space to take on an objective in a single location, or drop you into a larger area you can explore that’s similar to a public area in Destiny, but with a clear set of mission goals you’re working to complete. There’s some variety in these sections in that you can look around for extra loot or side objectives that aren’t part of your main mission. In one open area, a little exploration exposed a tougher high-value target-type enemy that dropped gear when you killed it. In another, you could find a locked-up treasure chest that required finding specific switches to open. The exploration portion gives you a little variety for these missions, but it can make them feel a bit unfocused, and not every hero feels great for platforming and traversal (looking at you, Hulk). They’re at their best when you work through an area with specific challenges, like traps that deal electrical or radiation damage, or enemies that wield cryo weapons that can freeze you in place.
One problem with the multiplayer missions is that they all feel rather samey. Most of the missions in the beta have you breaking into some AIM bunker, which looks like a cross between a bland Halo Forerunner facility and a post-modern office building. Whether you’re attacking them in the forests of the Pacific Northwest or the American desert, the bunkers are all the same. Their generic nature makes these missions run together, and while fights can get cool as Marvel’s Avengers starts introducing tougher enemies and objectives that require teamwork, they’re not nearly as fun or well-made as the story missions.
Part of that issue is that most of the multiplayer missions have to accommodate any combination of Avengers–the missions are more fun when they’re more focused on accommodating the specific abilities and playstyle of a particular hero, or when they throw something like the walking mech tank at you, requiring you to run under, around, and on top of the thing in order to beat it.
Gearing Up
Those repeatable missions play into the gear grind of Marvel’s Avengers, which is what will keep you busy over the long haul. Like other live games, it’s a complex and convoluted system, and it’s tough to get a sense of how well it works without engaging with it over a long period and into some sort of endgame, when you start to get all the best stuff and work out how to utilize it well. The gear system works similarly to other live games like Destiny and Anthem, at least at low levels: you find gear as you play and equip the stuff with the best numbers, which improves your hero’s statistics. There are a bunch of these stats to keep in mind, like health, defense, melee effectiveness, and ranged effectiveness, and gear also conveys various buffs, such as defense against freezing attacks or a chance to inflict radiation damage on enemies.
At low levels, though, you probably won’t pay attention to gear much, and will just change out each piece for the next one you get with higher numbers. There are cases where gear will matter–one story mission takes you to Siberia, where the AIM troops are all bringing guns that can freeze you, so you’re encouraged to wear gear with freeze defense. Multiplayer missions will give you a heads-up about what you’ll be facing so you can plan accordingly, so it’s nice to have gear that can give you an advantage in specific situations. But this feels more like a thing you’ll be worrying about later in the game more than early on.
And the gear system is not an especially clear one. Your hero’s Power level, determined by your gear, dictates which missions you can handle without getting your clock cleaned, so the numbers will matter to you–but there are a bunch of aspects to it that are going to take some time to understand. Armor conveys various buffs at first, and better gear will also include additional perks you can unlock by “boosting” that armor. To do that, you have to spend different resources you get in missions, and that increases a piece of armor’s Power stats as well. It seems like the idea is to allow you to grow a piece of gear you particularly like or need beyond its initial Power numbers, so it stays viable in your loadout. There are a whole bunch of different resources with different rarities, and different requirements for different gear pieces, and you’ll probably ignore that system for much of the early game as you cycle through gear you don’t want to keep. It all seems fairly confusing up front.
That’s sort of the general feeling of the entire Marvel’s Avengers beta–there’s a lot to keep track of and it’s not quite clear how well all these systems will work together yet. That’s partially because the beta is just a small slice of the overall game, meant to emphasize combat and how characters will work together in teams. And once I got the hang of it, that stuff was impressive. Ms. Marvel and Black Widow in particular are a lot of fun to play as you start to unlock their moves and understand how to use them effectively. Both characters emphasize agility, speed, and skill: Black Widow’s grapple lets you hit trouble spots in a fight with ease, where you can sweep an enemy’s leg to knock them down, then pummel them before they ever get a shot in. Kamala is quick and adaptable but in something more of a support capacity, and using her well really feels like you’re helping out the team as you heal them or help keep a bunch of enemies tied up while an ally handles some bigger threat.
But all the characters have cool strengths and interesting abilities, and once you know how to play them well (and you unlock their cooler skills), they start to feel like they’re providing unique experiences within the game. By the end, I was even coming around on Hulk, who I initially disliked playing because he often felt lumbering and clumsy. A lingering question is how well these characters can synergize together on tougher missions as you approach the endgame of Marvel’s Avengers–it really seems like the more time you can invest in a character, the cooler they become, and I suspect teams who know their characters well and can work together will get a lot out of the combat.
The beta left me most interested in the story campaign of Marvel’s Avengers, though, and that seems like the place where the game has the most potential. Kamala is a great lens through which to view the established characters of the core Avengers team; she’s a fan and an audience surrogate, engaging with the superheroes in a very human way. In general, Marvel’s Avengers feels like it’s continuing all the best aspects of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Avengers characters, telling a story in the vein of Captain America: Civil War or Avengers: Infinity War. They’re flawed and conflicted, and sometimes, they fail in painful and devastating ways. The writing and voice acting seem strong enough in the beta snapshot to support that kind of story, and it’s easily what has me most excited for Marvel’s Avengers.
Much of the rest is more of a wait-and-see situation. I’m not thrilled by the generic-looking AIM bunkers or the somewhat unfocused feel of the multiplayer missions, and it’s much too early to really get a sense of whether the gear grind in Avengers will feel especially meaningful from a gameplay perspective. But I found myself becoming a fan of the game’s combat and characters, especially as I developed them. I’m not sure Marvel’s Avengers is a game that will support you playing a whole bunch of characters–it seems a little too confusing and a little too big an investment to try to get good at more than a small handful of heroes–but the idea of playing with a core group of friends who each specialize in one or two Avengers to make a cohesive, capable team is pretty compelling. There are still a lot of unknowns with Marvel’s Avengers, but with a better sense of the game, there are aspects that are promising.
A beta for Marvel’s Avengers has arrived, giving players a chance to actually try Crystal Dynamics’ upcoming superhero live game. The GameSpot crew got a chance to check out the beta a few days early, trying out four of its characters–Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk, Black Widow, and Ms. Marvel aka Kamala Khan–as well as seeing its live game and multiplayer systems in action. In the video above, we run through our impressions of the beta, which answered a few questions and left us some more.
Topics discussed include combat, character progression, teamwork, the loot grind, and the level design. There’s a lot to cover in this beta, and while we’ve only seen a small slice of what to expect from the whole game, we’ve got a lot of thoughts about story, multiplayer, and whether Marvel’s Avengers can keep players engaged for the long haul.
The beta will be released first on August 7 for those who pre-ordered the game on PlayStation 4. The following Friday, August 14, it will be an open beta for PS4 players and the pre-order beta for Xbox and PC users. Then on August 21 it will be the open beta for Xbox One and PC players. The full release of Marvel’s Avengers will be September 4, 2020 for PS4, Xbox One, Stadia, and PC with PS5 and Xbox Series X versions coming later.
