Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects

The harsh reality is that Nemesis isn’t as much fun as it could be. This will come as a severe letdown to fellow marvel fans that had fostered dreams of massive scrapfests between some of the most powerful and popular characters in comics. The thing is, those titanic conflicts are certainly present and accounted for, but some how they manage to be an equal mix of frustration and fun. So, what is the problem? Marvel nemesis is a game confused about its own identity.

It wants to be a fighting game, but lacks the skill driven combos and tricks that make the fighting genre worthwhile. It also wants to be a plot driven action game, but the story is bland and contrived while the action feels repetitive. A mix of these two genres is certainly a cool idea, but the implementation in this case falls short. Thankfully, there are few cool things that save it from disaster. The most noticeable are stellar character designs.

Marvel’s finest have rarely looked better in a game, from spider man’s acrobatics to storms wind driven fight. And while it would be hard for the new “Imperfect” characters to feel like anything but pretenders, several of them are downright awesome. Beyond this, it’s definitely cool that each of the characters has unique strengths, movement styles and battle moves. Unfortunately, some horrendous balancing of the single player game, along with only a tiny handful of enemy types, makes playing through to unlock all these cool fighters a major chore. Meanwhile, the primary versus mode feels shallow and cheap, tending to reward chicken fighting tactics over raw skill.