Marvel Mighty Heroes: A Half-Assed Review, for a Half-Assed Game

     When Marvel Mighty Heroes first hit the mobile games scene I was anticipating a cutesy version of Marvel Heroes 2015 or Ultimate Alliance, but instead DeNA gave us... something else.  And it's not a good something else by any means.

I do actually like the style.  And Spider-Man 2099, Miguel O'Hara.

     I'll start with the good.  The art style is quite good.  The big-headed, cartoony take on many famous heroes is quite fitting and actually works very well here.  The roster is huge, starting with Marvel staples like Captain America and Nick Fury, and opening many more over time like Daredevil and Black Widow.
     Initially the levels start fairly easy with a 4 player co-op in a competitive match with one of a few goals such as "defend the crates" or the always present defeat a specific boss.  Players compete against each other to make the most amount of points while working as a team to finish the set task.

     Sadly, that's about where the good ends and all the crap begins.  A much worse apparent cash grab then takes over and is driven home by the boring and highly repetitive rest of the game, which is steeped in IAP driven design.
     The tap based controls are horrendous, oftentimes resulting in seeing the tap on the screen and the character, quite literally, walking in the other direction.  A fact exacerbated in mobs of enemies when controlling the character becomes impossible.  Honestly, the responsiveness was so poor, I wanted to abandon it immediately.

     In the great path of pay-to-win gaming, the IAPs can give players more energy to play levels, gear to level up, and gold to unlock more characters.  But alas, the rarity and rolls for them can be so terrible that it feels purposely designed to take money and spit out nothing.  After weeks of the one free hero a day button attempts I received a singular hero I didn't originally have, and after tossing some money in to see what would happen I received 9 characters (same costumes as well) I already had (including 4 of the same EXACT Thor) and 1 new character.

     So, for a game that touts a vast cast of characters, the lottery method of obtaining them makes it extremely difficult to make the game enjoyable, when it's damn near impossible to get ones you like.  Not to mention the overpowered characters are so ridiculously overpowered that if they are in your match, even if you used extra energy to get a triple damage/score multiplier, they will win.  Every.  Single.  Time.  I'm specifically naming Thanos and Dr. Strange.  Their abilities will overtake anything else in the game and they will always get the win.

Pretty awesome that we lost all our energy to play to also lose our points.

     What makes this intolerable is the one-minute matches (actually a good idea) can be disrupted at any time if the internet connection is anything less than 100% perfect, resulting in time vanishing from the clock, causing a loss and waste of energy.  The game also has a tendency to "lose" information.  In one of my screen caps (above), all players received 0 points and the position I was in is the same one I gained- leaving me with a waste of resources.  Another screencap (below), if you look, has me as Daredevil, but with the Punisher's special abilities.  Whenever it happened, I got locked in place until the timer ran out, and yet again, got neither points, nor the wasted energy back.  The entire game appears to have been designed to screw people out of time and money.

Why does Daredevil have The Punisher's powers???

     While the art style is damn good, there isn't much of a plot even with the more recent addition of a "story mode," the tremendous number of bugs make it almost unplayable, and it is downright boring after the first few levels.  It is the same 3 levels and the same types of enemies on repeat for the whole game.
     I got Marvel Mighty Heroes the first week it was released, spent weeks playing it, and then periodically returned to see if it would get better.  It never did.  There is NO WAY I could ever recommend this game to anyone.

     I would immediately recommend anyone reading this to play Marvel Future Fight instead.  It is a superior game in every imaginable way, even if it also uses the lottery-type character unlock feature.  Or if you like the cutesy art, play the free PC game Marvel Hero Up, which is far better than this.

     I will also ALWAYS recommend the Marvel Heroes 2015 free-to-play game.  It is nearly the only free-to-play that is done right.