Coming-of-age heroes are staples of Marvel adventures, so it’s easy to see the appeal of playing as several of them in this life-simulation addition to the comic book franchise’s games catalog. Popular Avengers characters including Iron Man, Black Widow, the Hulk and Nick Fury feature, but does this game present as much of a fun playground as it initially seems to?
The answer: not really. From the beginning, it feels very much like the kind of game intended to be played in occasional bursts, perhaps in-between sessions of work, rather than for hours on end. That’s because limits imposed by the freemium structure can be met at almost every turn. Once you select an action for a character, you can be waiting minutes or even hours for them to complete it – unless, vitally, you cough up some hard-earned virtual currency. Which can be bought with real currency…
Such limits can make playing MARVEL Avengers Academy surprisingly expensive. It also doesn’t help that many of the most exciting playable characters can be out of your reach until far into the game, while the feature enabling different characters to date is currently behind one of those tantalizing “coming soon” notices. There’s still plenty to get on with, we should stress. However, for now, this game – which got its initial release only last week – feels less like an all-conquering superhero and more like an aspiring, albeit very promising, youngster still waiting to cut their teeth. How strangely apt.
