Marvel Cosmic Invasion review: we heart the 90s

It’s the simple things, sometimes, that make you fall in love with a game, and I knew I was in good hands seconds into Marvel Cosmic Invasion when I first used Spider-Man’s jump attack.

Without needing to be told, I knew exactly what it would be – Spidey thwips out a web and swings across the screen, catching airborne enemies with a solid kick. It’s the exact move you expect, and it feels just as good as it should when it connects mid-air.

Marvel Cosmic Invasion is pure comfort food. The game is from the same studio behind 2022’s brilliant Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge, and follows a similar blueprint to that game. It plays like an old 90s beat-em-up arcade game, but with the difficulty turned down and with a few modern quality-of-life improvements.

You can practically feel the pizza-greased joystick in your hand as you smash your way through all the enemies on screen.

A little Marvel knowledge goes a long way

At the start of each level, up to four players each pick two characters from a pool of 11 characters (which bumps up to 15 by the time the campaign is over). A quick tap of the left shoulder button during gameplay swaps your character out, and if you tap during a combo the other character will jump in and lend a hand.

The game’s controls are very easy to pick up: combos are simple, your move sets are uncomplicated, and there’s little scope for complex strategy. It’s a game about feeling superheroic in the most straightforward way – by pummelling lots of bad guys.

In most cases when I picked a new character to play as, I found that my basic comic knowledge – developed through Marvel films and a few trade paperbacks – was enough to tell me how they’d play.

Wolverine is all fast melee moves and devastating grab attacks. Iron Man is slower, but can fly and attack from a distance. Rocket Racoon is fast and favours guns. She-Hulk can grab and block effectively and Captain America is a solid all-rounder. It’s all as you’d expect.

Even the deep cut characters, like Cosmic Ghost Rider and Beta Ray Bill, communicate how they’ll control – whether they’ll have ranged attacks or grabs, blocks or dodges, or whether they’ll do huge damage or launch lots of attacks – just through their look and vibe.

Each character’s super ability is tied to a ‘focus’ bar that recharges with generous speed. It can do massive damage if deployed at the right time, and they each get a distinct and satisfying animation for their biggest attack. I came away from the game wanting to know more about the characters I was less familiar with.

My personal favourite character is Black Panther, who whips around the screen in a blur, unleashing furious combos with his claws and flinging Vibranium blades around. My partner, who joined me in co-op, was similarly attached to Wolverine. The diminutive mutant is voiced by Cal Dodd, who also voices him in the old 90s cartoon (and the excellent X-Men ’97). He’s perfected his pronunciation of ‘bub’ over decades and hearing him is a delight.

In fact, many of the characters in the game are voiced by actors who have previously portrayed them in animated series, so you can rest assured, for instance, that Spidey’s quips will sound appropriate to the 90s.

Marvel Cosmic Invasion commits to the 90s

Crucial to the game’s 90s energy is its commitment to never referencing the modern Marvel films. This is the Marvel from the old comics, with a complicated web of connections and lots of fun quips as different Marvel characters pop in and out of the story.

The game’s big bad, Annihilus, is not one I was familiar with. They’re a Fantastic Four villain, which is interesting considering that Marvel’s first family does not appear in the game at all.

Lots of other villains step into the spotlight too, through the game’s boss fights. These are rarely particularly complicated, with fairly straightforward attack patterns, but every one of them is fun.

You need to be a little strategic, but brute-force attacking at all opportunities is usually pretty effective too, and landing a massive combo on a smarmy enemy is hugely satisfying. This is a game where slamming the light attack button to pull off a simple attack combo just never stops feeling great.

All good decades have their limitations

There’s just one thing holding Marvel Cosmic Invasion back: it’s smaller than I want it to be. It’s not just that the game doesn’t take long to beat – the three hours it took to reach the credits definitely flew by – but Cosmic Invasion is also lacking in gimmicks.

Don’t expect vehicle levels, or shifts in perspective or many hidden goodies to find (although there are a great many awesome Marvel Easter eggs). There are some objectives tied to specific characters in each level, but they’re all pretty straightforward.

Outside of bosses, the variety of enemies is limited too. You can play the main campaign in Arcade mode with a bunch of unlockable modifiers to make the game more challenging, but there’s nothing here that so fundamentally reinvents the game that playing it again feels like a new experience.

Playing through in two-player co-op, the only strategy we really needed to discuss was who was going to pick up each healing item we encountered. Characters level up as you play, but the cap is low, as is the incentive to raise every character up.

The story is thin, which is fine, but because the brief cutscenes are fun and the voice-acting is so good, more would not have gone astray.

Watch the Marvel Cosmic Invasion trailer

Tuning into the simple pleasures

All things considered, it’s probably one step below the sublime Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge (the Wu-Tang track in Shredder’s Revenge clinches it), but that’s okay. Cosmic Invasion comes close, and with Marvel’s stable of characters, a later release of downloadable content feels all but inevitable. I’d be happy to replay this game with Mr Fantastic, or Jessica Jones, or Howard the Duck, or whoever else they deem to be a good fit a few months down the road.

Marvel Cosmic Invasion is not complicated. It’s an old 90s arcade game but designed with a one-time payment in mind rather than needing a constant stream of coins. It’s relatively easy to finish but the moment-to-moment experience of playing it is hugely satisfying. More than anything, it makes me want to pick up a huge anthology of fun old Marvel comics and enjoy some convoluted plotting.

Here’s perhaps the most illustrative anecdote I can give you about this game. When we defeated the final boss, as with all enemies, we realised we could keep the combo going by continuing to pummel their now lifeless body. The game was over, we were about to roll credits, but we did not stop attacking until we each had a combo count above 100.

Even when the final boss was down, hitting the buttons and watching the attack animation play out was fun and satisfying enough that we just kept attacking for a while. It really is the simple things, sometimes.

Marvel Cosmic Invasion launches on 2 December.

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