Since Overwatch launched in 2016, I've drifted in and out of Blizzard's hero shooter. While its "everyone is broken so nobody is broken" philosophy was chipped away by reworks and competitive-minded balance tweaks intent on establishing a meta, I longed for the days where one feral Winston could bludgeon an ill-prepared team with his bare-hands. Luckily, Marvel Rivals has done a fantastic job at recapturing that chaos – and as an agent of said chaos, I'm obsessed with the game's current Vanguard roster.
Sure, it's fun to watch health bars disappear as a damage-dealing Duelist, or see them steadily rise while playing a more supportive Strategist. But you know what's better? Watching your own health refuse to budge while everyone else's (friend or foe, it makes no difference) collapses like a dying star. That is the unshakeable power – nay, the burden – of Vanguards, who must hold the line and cling to the objective at all costs. Sometimes, as a little treat, you can sic yourself on the enemy's backline and cackle as they crumble around you. And if we lose because of it? Eh, blame the Duelist.
Punch drunk
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In last year's Marvel Rivals beta, I fell in love with Venom. Venom is a pretty strange tank due to his mobility, which lets him swing around the map and climb up walls, but he feels much more conventional when you dive into the thick of things and lock down an entire team with his sticky moveset. I've not played Venom as much since Marvel Rivals' full launch, but I'm quick on the draw to lock in Thor, and my soft spot for Overwatch's shield-toting nice boy Reinhardt means Magneto is a logical favorite.
The trio thrive in slightly different encounters. Venom and Thor are great picks for charging into the enemy's frontline, while Magneto is best-placed on the objective to draw enemy fire. But they all need to be in the midst of combat to be effective, and that means walking a tightrope between playing for the team and playing for kills. I try – I really, really do – to stick to the former, often physically planting myself in front of the objective so that my squishier team can seize it in peace. But, as every Marvel Rivals player will know, the temptation to go completely and utterly apeshit never truly goes away. All it takes is an eyeful of low-health Duelists – or in Venom's case, a mid-swing glimpse of five bunched-up supes – and it's go time.
Of course, go time typically means charging in for a quick glut of KOs before the accumulative firepower of their entire team takes you down like a rampaging elephant brought low by a flurry of tranquilizer darts. Listen: I know it's wrong, and I know pushing too far ahead of your team is rarely the smartest strategy. But those sweet moments where you are the worst thing to happen to the enemy team, before it all comes crashing down, make it all worth it – even if your newly-vulnerable Strategists may disagree.
Alternately, you can actually get away with a lot of these antics because almost everyone is doing it. The newness of Marvel Rivals means that things like metas and "right" ways of doing things aren't as concrete at a casual level, which allows for a lot of things working that shouldn't. Balanced team compositions? Disciplined front-to-back teamfighting? Players even knowing what their character does? Be realistic: this is a suped-up free-for-all on both sides, meaning Venom bowling into opponents like a sticky bowling ball is often a perfectly viable tactic.
I don't tend to dabble in competitive shooters any more, so this sort of messiness is far more to my liking than matches dictated by a stringent meta. Marvel Rivals character tier lists go some way toward shaping a norm, but even that's more a personal decision to seek out and inform who you'll play, rather than an expectation. Hero shooters, with their higher health pools across the board and glut of healing sources, are by their nature a little more casual-minded than the likes of Call of Duty or Escape from Tarkov. In ranked play there's room to flesh out a meta and play up the genre's much-adored emphasis on teamwork, but I'd love to see unranked matches keep their chaos-by-design vibe.
Marvel Rivals' Team-Ups and class system smartly offer a framework for cooperation without being too heavy-handed, and I'd love to see NetEase maintain that approach going forward. Sure, working as a cohesive team to scrap out a victory is deeply rewarding in its own right, and I'll always play to win – but all tanking and no trouncing makes Thor a dull boy.
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