Very few games break a million downloads. Helldivers 2 — which was, until very recently, my top guess for being the most popular new game of 2024 — saw 12 million downloads in its first three months. Marvel Rivals achieved 10 million players in three days.
That’s massive.
While you can technically compare Helldivers 2 to Rivals, it’s not the best comparison. Helldivers 2 was limited to just PC and PlayStation 5, and it was $40 at launch. Rivals is available on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox X/S consoles, AND it’s completely free to play.
Free-to-play games will always pull in bigger raw numbers than games locked behind a price tag will. Add onto that the official blessing (i.e., licensing rights) to what is the largest film franchise in history that is also based on the largest comic book publisher in history and the numbers are going to add up quickly.
But Rivals’s success isn’t just due to the fact that it costs nothing to play or that it comes packed with iconic heroes like Hulk, Spider-Man and Captain America. On its own, without the flashy recognizable heroes, Rivals would be a solid game. Just look at the state of the game at launch.
As rare as it is for a game to hit a million downloads, its even rarer for a hugely popular, fully online game to have such a smooth launch. As literal millions of people downloaded and jumped into Rivals over the past week and a half, I experienced hardly any server lag, no server downtime and zero bugs. I have friends who are experiencing regular crashes (which Rivals provides some solutions to when the game first loads up), so I know first-hand that some people are experiencing issues, but I can’t say I’m one of them.
A smooth launch only takes a game so far though. That’s where the gameplay of Rivals — no pun intended — comes into play.
What NetEase Games and Marvel Entertainment built is an impressive superhero battle simulator. You can blast your enemies with powerful lightning bolts as Thor or Storm; swing around maps and crawl up walls as Spider-Man or Venom; or Hulk-smash whichever enemy looked at you the wrong way first. It’s fun being mighty and the fantasy of controlling super heroic powers is not missing from Rivals.
Outside of the thrill of getting to play as some of the most iconic heroes and villains ever, Rivals showcases some very impressive technical feats. Most notably, Dr. Strange’s ability to open a portal from one area to another is more than a simple teleport spawn: his portal is a live look at whatever is going on at the other end of the portal. I’ve seen this done before in single-player games but I’ve not seen it done this well in a multiplayer game before.
Additionally, the game’s environments are pretty destructible. To watch the Hulk bash through a wall, causing the rest of the wall to cave in behind him, without any sort of framerate hiccup or wonky physics-based interaction take place is quite impressive to behold.
It’s not all picture perfect. Besides the aforementioned crashes I know people are experiencing, there are a handful of cumbersome movement issues that I’ve come across (like trying to web swing in an enclosed area) and hitting the environment with a ranged attack because of the offset camera not perfectly aligning with your cross hair can be frustrating, but a lot of that has to do with me just getting used to the game’s mechanics.
If you’re not one of the ten million plus people who are already Hulk-smashing through the matchmaking, I urge you to give the game a shot. Even if you have a soft knowledge of the Marvel Universe…you really don’t need to know much at all to appreciate the gameplay in Rivals. Be patient, keep an eye on your positioning around your team and try all the characters…one may really click with you.
