My first impression of Marvel's Avengers (Beta)... (long text warning)
I have unlocked quite a lot on the skill trees for the 4 characters, so I have a better feel of combat now. Still I don't find combat satisfying. Each character has some good bits but also lots of things that keep it from being fun. Like Ironman, his rockets and pulse (heavy attack) are useful but keep running out of 'ammo' (have to melee enemies to refill bar, makes no sense). His laser (direct beam or spinning rays) doesn't deal much damage. And to fly from one spot to another (like holding an area then go to another that is under attack), the flying is slow, switch to flight mode (L3) he flies too fast, the transition from flight to ground attack is slow and imprecise. Hulk is amazingly weak and lacks range attack (throwing different sizes of rocks usually miss). Ms Marvel's range attack is very limited in range. Most of her moves I don't really see how they are useful so I end up using the basic ones. Black Widow is an all-rounder but not particularly powerful in anything. And all the characters seem to lack area-clearing abilities, there are some AOE attacks but they are quit lame, like Hulk jumping up and elbow slam, doesn't kill anyone. How about just a simple grenade (I think it's Black Widow who has some sort of grenade but doesn't do much) or grenade/rocket launcher (Ironman has rockets but doesn't do much of AOE damage). There's no good hero that I want to keep playing (though I definitely hate playing as Hulk).
I am also confused with those skills involving dodge. A lot of skills are described like "when dodging, triangle to...", am I supposed to manually execute a dodge (circle button) then execute this move, or by pressing this button it will automatically do a dodge and then the move? How the heck is Hulk able to pull off such moves when his dodge is so super slow? There are a lot of unexplained things, like how the L1/R1/L1+R1 skill meters are filled, what is willpower, what are all the orange/red/white/purple orbs (green ones are obviously health), what are the different 'element' types (like cryo), what's the difference between the different color artifacts (doesn't seem to relate to element types). Hopefully that's because in the beta they took out a big section that would explain these. (Btw, I find it ridiculous that the superheroes have to keep smashing crates like some cartoon game mascots.)
There's quite a lot of bad UI designs. My biggest gripe is how tedious it is to swap characters (no, you can't swap on-the-fly during battle, I am not talking about that). To swap, you have to go to the table, select a mission, then go to the menu for party member selection, then enter the character menu from there. When you are viewing the gears or skills of one hero, you can't just hit a button (R1/L1) to view another hero, this is so stupid and tedious. I know, in Destiny you have to exit to title screen to switch, but the characters there are isolated, you can't play together with your other characters, here you are a party of heroes, you have to manage the other characters at the same time. And it seems like the game doesn't remember what you set up before. When returning to the game, your matchmaking setting is reset to On. And when I returned all the other heroes have their gears reset to the default weakest. Also have to complain that the interact button (hold square, to open chest or interact with a panel or lift button) is too sensitive to how close you are and the direction you are facing. Sometime I see the prompt but when I hold square, Ironman will start punching air (light attack) then do upper cut and fly into the air (his move when holding light attack button), really hilarious.
The graphics I can still tahan, nothing great, far below Destiny level. The frame rate is so so bad. Often simply looking around can give me minor dizziness, even when just walking around the home base. (And wtf with the super slow walking speed on the ship. You can sprint as normal but Kamala walks so very slowly. This reminds me of Anthem's home base slow walk, not a good reference they want to compare to.) Talking about visuals, when you change individual gears (on the Gears menu), there is no visible change on your character. The only change is when you switch costume (on the Cosmetics menu), which you have to buy with in-game currency (which you get by completing daily and weekly challenges) and most likely through paid microtransactions.
At this point, I am not convinced with this live-service game. Will wait for reviews, which I don't think is going to be good, but given the license I think the game is still going to sell very well, so it might be a few years before it goes free-to-play. What I want to see is how much more contents there is in the full game. How much more story campaign there is (hopefully those can be played repeatedly)? Are there going to be open-world areas where different players can roam together freely and take on common public events (like Destiny, Anthem) etc. (unlikely, given there are only a few heroes, you will be running into identical Ironmans everywhere, lol)? Are there going to be seasons (meaning you have to pay $10 or something every 3 months)? All these currently available small missions on the table and HARM room are not what I consider 'contents', they are more like 'challenge rooms', they are not even at the level of Destiny's strikes or raids. If such 'contents' is all there is, this game is repetitive as hell. For the record, after playing Anthem's beta, I was still leaning towards buying that game (the reviews stopped me, heng ah), but here I am not even thinking about it (unless reviews are so overwhelmingly positive).
PS. Surprisingly I am not tired of Fall Guys yet, don't find it repetitive at all, lol.