Marvel Rivals

The third-person camera is the decision that makes this work, and it is a strange one. Hero shooters have been first-person by convention for a decade because it reads cleaner. Marvel Rivals goes third-person, accepts the worse clarity, and gets back something more valuable: you can see your own character being Spider-Man.

Legibility traded for spectacle

That trade costs it competitively. Tracking is harder, corners hide more, and the ultimate abilities produce moments where four screen-filling effects overlap and nobody can tell what killed them. In a serious ranked context that would be disqualifying.

It is not a serious ranked context, and it knows. The character kits lean into asymmetry rather than balance — some heroes are simply stronger, some team compositions are simply better, and the seasonal patches shuffle who without pretending the goal is parity. After forty-four hours I am not convinced that is wrong. Overwatch spent years sanding characters into equivalence and lost most of what made them worth learning.

Peak rank

Diamond III

Characters played

All of them

Hours as Rocket Raccoon

Embarrassing

Destruction that matters slightly

Environments partially collapse — walls open, cover disappears, sightlines change mid-fight. It is not deep, and by the fiftieth match you know which walls go, but it does something few shooters manage: it makes the third minute of a fight geometrically different from the first.

Where it slips

The monetisation is aggressive in the modern way, which is to say it is not aggressive at any single moment and is enormous in aggregate. Nothing gated is mechanical, which matters, but the battle pass economy is designed around the assumption that you will play daily, and it stops being fun the week you notice.

Matchmaking at higher ranks is also thin outside peak hours, and the game has no answer for a teammate who instantly locks a duelist and refuses to move.

The verdict

Forty-four hours, most of them enjoyable, none of them serious. This is the shooter to play when you want a fight rather than a match. If you want the competitive one, it is not this and it probably never will be.

Free to try, which makes the recommendation easy.