Marvel Heroes launched on Windows PC on June 4, 2013, a free-to-play action role-playing game from Gazillion Entertainment built on a Marvel roster that most licensed games of the era could only dream about. It was a game about picking a hero and making that hero yours. It was also, quietly, one of the better action RPGs of its generation.
Trailer, via Marvel Heroes Omega.
Iron Man, Deadpool, and the Roster Problem
At launch, Marvel Heroes had 21 playable characters. By July 2017, that number had grown to 63. The roster ran from the obvious to the genuinely obscure. Iron Man, Captain America, Wolverine and Spider-Man sat alongside Squirrel Girl. Loki and Venom, both villains, were playable too. Each character was built as either Melee or Ranged, with unique attributes and talent trees.
That range is the game’s signature achievement. A licensed Marvel game that lets you play as Squirrel Girl understands its own audience better than most. The story was written by Brian Michael Bendis, which gave the campaign a credibility licensed games rarely earned.
Pre-purchasers got early access on May 29, 2013. The official launch followed on June 4, 2013, on Microsoft Windows. An OS X version arrived in November 2014. The game was renamed Marvel Heroes 2015 on June 4, 2014, then Marvel Heroes 2016 in January 2016.
Three Trees, Twenty Points, and the Eternity Splinter
The core loop was standard action RPG structure executed with unusual care. As characters gained levels they gained passive stat increases tuned to that character and power points to spend on abilities. Each character had three power trees, and each tree generally focused on a mechanic or play style. Punisher’s were:
- Assault, for melee
- Firepower, for guns
- Demolition, for explosives
Hawkeye’s three were Archery, Fighting and Trick Arrows. That structure gave every character a real identity rather than a reskinned moveset. Each skill capped at 20 power points, with a maximum of 50 points reachable from gear bonuses. Skills also had level caps, so you could not dump everything into one ability until you had leveled far enough.
The monetization deserves specific credit. Marvel Heroes was free-to-play with micro-transactions, but players could unlock most purchasable things with in-game currency. The Eternity Splinter system let players obtain any playable character through timed drops used as currency with Adam Warlock. Splinters could also buy a random Cosmic item, upgrade a character’s Ultimate ability, or purchase a Team-Up companion. That is a fairer model than the previous random hero drop system, and fairer than most of what the genre was doing in 2013.
The Cosmic Cube and the Raft
The plot starts with Doctor Doom obtaining the Cosmic Cube and using it to incinerate the Watcher. The player responds to a theft in Queens, then travels to the Raft, where Madame Hydra and Hydra have staged a breakout. The player reactivates the security system, locks down the cell blocks, and recaptures Green Goblin and Living Laser. Many villains still escape.
Madame Hydra meets Doom afterward and declares the breakout a success. Doom gives her a chip that exploits a flaw in Tony Stark’s security system. Daredevil recaptures Rhino in Hell’s Kitchen. The player recaptures Shocker in an abandoned subway. Doctor Octopus tries to steal the Tablet of Life and Time from the Blood Rose nightclub and is stopped.
The Hood then appears through a portal and steals the tablet. The player travels to Industry City, fighting Advanced Idea Mechanics and Kingpin’s Maggia while hunting him. Hood is defeated and taken into custody, only to reveal he already sold the Tablet to the Hand.
Madripoor, Elektra, and the Kingpin Problem
The heroes travel to Madripoor, the Hand’s base of operations, and discover Hydra is also attacking the Hand to seize the Tablet. The heroes subdue Madame Viper, cull the Hydra invasion, and defeat the Hand’s leader Gorgon and his top assassin Elektra, reclaiming the tablet.
Back in New York, Kingpin uses his legal connections to force the heroes to return the Tablet to him. Knowing it is too powerful to leave in his hands, the heroes work to expose him. That is a real plot, with factions, double-crosses, and a villain who wins a round through lawyers rather than fists. It is more coherent than the campaign structure of most games in the genre, which tend to treat story as a delivery mechanism for loot.
What the Relaunches Actually Fixed
Several updates after launch rebalanced many of the game’s systems. Story Mode could be used to fully level any hero. Defensive stats were consolidated and simplified. These are the kinds of changes that read as boring in patch notes and matter enormously in play.
Renaming the game every year was a marketing gimmick, and it worked better than it should have. It signaled the game was still being supported, which for a free-to-play title is the only question that matters.
The console version complicates the story. On April 5, 2017, a PlayStation 4 and Xbox One version was announced, branded Marvel Heroes Omega. It released on June 30, 2017.
The Shutdown Nobody Planned For
On November 15, 2017, Disney announced it was ending its relationship with Gazillion Entertainment. Marvel Heroes would shut down at the end of 2017. The game and its website went offline on November 27, 2017, and Gazillion was shut down.
That is a brutal ending for a game that had been actively expanding months earlier. The Omega console release landed in June. The shutdown announcement came in November. Players who started playing the console version had roughly five months with it.
The shutdown did not follow from anything in the game itself. The source reports a corporate decision and the consequences that followed. What it does not report is a verdict on the game’s quality, and the two things should not be confused. Marvel Heroes had 63 playable characters and a functioning economy when Disney ended the relationship.
Where It Lands
Marvel Heroes earns an 8.5 of 10. Here is what the score rests on, in order of weight:
- The roster. Sixty-three playable characters, each with three distinct power trees, is a design commitment most games in this genre never attempt.
- The Eternity Splinter system, which gave free players a real path to any hero they wanted.
- The Bendis-penned story, which gave the campaign a spine.
The deductions are real. The annual rebranding was noise. The game’s run ended on a corporate timetable, not a creative one.
But judged on what it was while it ran, Marvel Heroes delivered the thing licensed games almost never deliver: the sense that the roster was the point, not the decoration. You could main Squirrel Girl. That matters.
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