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Review of Marvel Contest of Champions for Android and iOS Devices

I've decided to give a review on the Android and iOS fighting game Marvel Contest of Champions now that I've finally obtained Ms. Marvel as a playable character (after several months of trying).

Marvel Contest of Champions is currently free to download on most Android and iOS devices. However, it does offer in-game purchases that cost real money. The game is rated T for Teen. It's also worth noting that it requires you to be connected to the Internet in order to play it.

Graphics

Please note: I've only played this game on a iPhone 5s and a Droid Turbo, so anything I say about this game is based on my experiences on those two devices. The screenshots I took of this game are from my Droid Turbo using the Droid Zap app.

The graphics for this game are probably the best I've ever seen in a mobile game. The charactes and stages are nicely detailed, and the game looks very polished overall. The styling used for the graphics is more on the cartoonish side, which may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I think it looks fantastic. The animations are quite fluid, and the game runs smoothly for the most part. Also, every costume I've seen in the game appears to be comic book accurate, which I definitely appreciate. Carol appears in the game as both Ms. Marvel and Captain Marvel, and she sports each persona's respective costume. The only issue I've seen with the graphics is that a lot of the animations are reused for multiple characters. For instance, I'm pretty sure every female character has the same exact basic move set. However, the animations still look very nice and none of them look too out of place for any character, so this is only a minor complaint.

Sound

This is probably the weakest aspect of the game. All of the sound effects used in the game are pretty solid and have good sound quality. The issue, however, is that there's not much variety in what you hear. The background music for every stage is the exact same, and every character shares their voice work with other characters. Every female character, for instance, uses the same voice recordings from the same voice actor. Other than basic grunts, characters don't ever speak, so what little voice acting there is in the game is extremely basic anyway. Also, the stages have background noises going on, but you really can't hear them over the background music. The sound effects used in the game do have all sound pretty good, in my opinion, so it's not that big a deal that there's not a lot of variety.

Gameplay

Marvel Contest of Champions is a fighting game in the same vein as Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. Like Street Fighter, the basic idea of the game is to use fighting moves to pummel your opponent's character and deplete their health bar. Probably the biggest difference between this game and Street Fighter is that winning isn't based around your skill as much as it's based on the rating of your characters. Every character in the game has a rating that's based on their tier, rank, and level. The higher their rating, the more damage and health a character will have. As you play more, you'll earn higher rated characters and be able to upgrade your lower rated characters. If you use money to pay for items, you can increase the ratings of your characters and earn better characters much quicker. In other words, this game is the very definition of pay-to-win.

The game mechanics are actually pretty robust for a mobile exclusive fighting game. You can't jump or crouch, but the amount of movement that characters have is still much better than most mobile fighting games. Your character can dash forward and back, which gives you the ability to dodge your opponent's attacks and close in on your opponent whenever they leave openings for attacks. On top of basic moves, every character also has special moves that need to be charged up. These attacks vary based on the character and range from short combos to unblockable attacks that cause massive damage. It's unfortunate that winning is more based on the rating of your character than actual skill because this game would be much more fun if you didn't know the outcome of a match before it even began. Heck, the game even shows you a meter prior to the beginning of every match that basically tells you who is going to win.

Contest of Champions offers multiple game modes, but ultimately they all play almost exactly the same. In every game mode, you just go through a series of A.I. controlled opponents and try to beat the ever-loving heck out of them. Even Versus mode, which you would assume has you going up against human controlled opponents, actually features A.I. controlled opponents as well. The A.I. is decent, but it would have been fun to play against friends.

Carolness

Carolness is a pretty important category because this is, afterall, CarolDanversFan.com. Carolness is the measure of how much of Carol a game has. Contest of Champions features two playable versions of Carol, one of Ms. Marvel and the other of Captain Marvel. Both versions of her play exactly the same. The only issue I have with Carol in this game is that it was way to difficult to obtain her. There's actually no straight forward way to obtain any specific character, and there really should be. You can obtain new characters by purchasing crystals, but the character you end up with is completely random, or so it would seem. The game also occasionally gives you a free high level crystal as a gift, and miraculously I obtained both versions of Carol through these free gift crystals and not from the dozens of crystals I paid money for. It just seemed rather odd to me. It was almost as though the game knew I wanted Carol and decided to give her to me for free after I had spent a decent amount of money.

Conclusion

Marvel Contest of Champions is an overall fun game, but it's also very frustrating to play at times. It could benefit from more variety, because certain elements are reused a lot. The graphics are terrific and the gameplay is robust and entertaining, but also a bit repetitive. My biggest criticism of the game is that there isn't a specific path for obtaining a character you want. The randomness of getting characters is frustrating and it almost deterred me from playing the game. I give the game an overall rating of 3 out of 4 stars.

(out of four stars)