Freemium Perdition: Marvel Future Fight

Marvel Future Fight
Supremely Simplistic Beat 'Em Up
1 Player
System: Android
Developer: Netmarble
Year of Release: 2015

Another free to play game, and so soon. Sheesh. As a tie in to Age of Ultron Marvel released a simplistic beat 'em up called, you guessed it, Marvel Future Fight. In this game you control a small squad of three heroes and you go through incredibly basic maps beating up bad guys leading to a stronger boss character with all of your actions controlled by a stamina bar and progress being slower than molasses. As far as free to play games are concerned, you could do worse.

Much like how Final Fantasy Record Keeper works because it follows its source material so well, Marvel Future Fight does the same thing. The plot is told through dialogue and still images of the characters, its very silly and referential in all the right ways. For example, Ultron was originally made by Hank Pym, the original Ant Man, but in the new movie Tony Stark is responsible. In the game Stark mentions how he could never concieve of unleashing something of this sort, before Black Widow jokingly tells him she thinks somewhere out in the multiverse a Tony Stark managed to make such a thing. This helps my enjoyment of the game quite a bit, though admittedly I usually end up just skipping through the cutscenes to start the loading process. Maybe the Galaxy S3 is just under powered but this game has severe loading times.

The flow of the game is simple, you pick a mission from a fairly meaty list and off you go through usually about three very linear rooms filled with enemies to beat up and boxes to break for money or items. There are two control styles which both work fairly well, a standard virtual joystick sort of deal, or an even simpler one touch control where you just tap to tell your hero where to go. Either way, you have basic attacks as well as various special attacks, initially two and I have yet to obtain another. The special attacks have a cool down, and you just want to pummel the enemy as quickly as possible. Technically there is a bit of finesse involved, if you can read your opponent well enough you can actually dodge a lot of attacks, though I myself am not very good at doing so. Aside from that you can switch between your characters at any time (with a slight cool down after switching to someone else). The combat system is simple, but it works well enough to keep someone like me coming back.

Graphically and aurally the game is actually surprisingly good. The music is kind of generic, but it fits well enough. I'm not too used to playing games on my phone, but this is one of the few fully 3D ones I have played and it looks like a PS2 game maybe? It looks good for a phone game anyway. Again this might just be due to having an older phone, but even on the lowest settings I still get some slow down from time to time.

Nice segue! Slow progress is ultimately this games downfall. Its a free to play phone game, they are designed to get you to want to spend cash on them, even if you can theoretically earn everything without spending a dime these games are designed in such a way to siphon money from your pockets. Naturally levelling up is a slow affair, but aside from that you need to level up your skills, equipment, rank and mastery. That seems really awesome right? All this customization? No! Fuck no! Its just more bullshit you need to grind to increase. More money, more materials, more everything! So, rank controls your max level and just increases your stats. Mastery is similar but takes more material, it ups your stats as well as unlocks a leadership skill which, when that character is leading, boosts your whole team with whatever buff they might have. You can get a mastery for each rank, so you have like, twelve upgrades which cost a lot of money and material to get. But the grind worsens!

You start with three characters, Captain America, Iron Man and Black Widow. Following the short tutorial you get another (random maybe?) hero, I got Iron Fist. After this you have to earn these strange trinkets called biometrics. Depending on how powerful a hero is you'll need to collect ten or twenty or forty or whatever amount of these things per hero. Now you can buy them with money or resources earned in game, or there is a free item you can grab daily that might drop a few, or you can grind through elite difficulty missions to hopefully earn one of them. This is grueling. I understand why it is the way that it is, and really for a free to play game its pretty fair. Just be prepared to not see a new face for quite a while. Worse still, the grindable heroes are set. So you have to make a certain amount of progress before you can hope to unlock them.

Speaking of progress, I'm stuck. I keep getting stuck actually. My team is all rank 1, save for Captain America, and anytime I barely manage to scrap by a mission I am unable to beat the next. That makes sense, as the game progresses it should get more difficult, sure. But I'm nearing my characters current max level and I'm nowhere near far enough to start grinding towards increasing his rank. I wind up almost winning but dying in the last second. Its a huge bummer when I'm nearing the end of the start of the game, but I can't really make progress which I need to make to strengthen my characters which I need to make progress which I have to make before I can strengthen my characters. Ugh!

I said this wasn't that bad of a game? Well, it really isn't. Its free, and if you don't waste a ton of money or time on it there is some fun to be had. Mainly for people who love Marvel, or who love seeing numbers go up as they slowly increase their power. I fall into both camps, and honestly getting a gimped version of Ultimate Alliance on my phone isn't the worse thing ever. Sure it might not be user friendly as Record Keeper, but for a fan of Marvel who routinely winds up messing around on their phones for whatever reason Future Fight might be worth a download.