Some Brief Thoughts on the Marvel's Avengers Beta on PC

Access to this beta was obtained via myVerizon redemption.

We're almost to the time of year where publishers tend to place large amounts of money on one very simple hope: that you, the consumer, are ready for some [x]. One of the more ballyhooed release simply by brand alone is Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics' attempt to adapt Marvel's Avengers to the sort of smaller screen of video games. It's actually been interesting, as one of Marvel's few weaknesses in their pure financial dominance is that they haven't managed to get a video game that can accurately translate the experience of the movies. Some of that is their own doing, what with wanting the lumbering video game making process to match Marvel's own much quicker churn of MCU fare. Not a lot good was said about Iron Man or Captain America or Thor's games on the Xbox 360. So they kind of left for mobile game pastures for a while.

But as the industry has ballooned once again in the console realm, so has the want for a big ole experience.

Unfortunately, the churn might have affected this one, too.

I would love to tell you about the gameplay of Marvel's Avengers in its beta, but there's only so many times that I can tell you that it crashed on my PC. Now, PCs are finicky as hell. A few weeks back, I fixed a frame rate problem by giving my controller a firmware update, which to me makes zero sense. Sometimes I have to restart my machine because it just does weird rendering stuff from time to time. So this is to say that I'm both used to potential stutters and occasional crashes. Hell, Death Stranding's PC port, which I promise I'll tell you cool people about soon, has weird crashes for me for stuff that doesn't seem to matter.

So don't take this lightly when I say that Marvel's Avengers achieves the worst consistency in performance I have ever tested on my computer. I have tried everything. I lowered all of the settings. I installed the HD pack. I switched the files to different drives. But all of that doesn't stop the game from having stutters that make Fallout 4 on a regular Xbox One seem like a quaint wait while also bizarrely jumping up to my monitor's 120hz refresh rate for a chunk of the time.

And then it crashes. It actually somehow crashes at the exact same spot. I'll be jumping around as The Hulk in this bridge scene (which is in the first 15 minutes to show you how this destroys any attempt at progression) and he'll set up to do a Hulk smash which he will lead by yelling "Hulk smash!" And smash he does as my controller shakes and I'm booted back to my desktop, never to get past that scene.

So that's my view. My view is that it's probably ok. Not terribly good. And the worst PC port I've ever played, if this is indicative of the final product.

[x] meaning football, basketball, games based on war, games based on movies, games that view their worlds as open, sometimes other sports, sometimes just cutting a dude's neck open, and the beloved etc.