The Game:
Marvel Future Fight is a free to play mobile game with freemium purchasing mechanics. It involves hero/villain collection and ranking through biometrics or x-genes and with six other methods making heroes and villains stronger individually and one method of making them stronger overall. It is top-down action based with skills for causing damage with each fight composed of a team of three heroes and/or villains. Some modes of play require the use of energy which is earned at a rate of one every five minutes. Players are also given a chance to earn extra energy through five quiz questions a day, five challenges a day, and are given a free energy recharge every twenty-four hours. Energy can be earned over the maximum amount through these methods.
The game has 19 modes of play, one of those, Epic Quest, currently comprised of four subsections with a total of 13 submodes of play with various limits on each one per day, Special Mission has three subsections with each having five modes of play with twenty attempts a day, Heroic Quest has five possibly paths to choose from but is completed mostly by playing other sections of the game, Daily Mission has three submodes to chose from with two completions a day, Dimension Rift is a rotating mode that allows players to collect rewards and tokens for the Support Shop timed and limited entry mode available at least once a day and allows players to enter other players’ rifts giving more entries, Legendary Battle has four sections to choose from with multiple subsections under those with five completions a day, Villain Siege has three levels of play each available for completion once a day, World Boss has ten different bosses to choose from but some are locked behind challenges and each of these has different levels of difficulty and reward. Alliance Raid is a boss mode allowed once a day as opened by raid leaders. Shadowland takes place over the course of a week and allows players one time use of each character to complete an entry, with the difficulty increasing after each completed entry. Ten Timeline Battle entries are given a day, except on Thursdays, when a second set of ten is given, to battle other players. Alliance Battle is given once a day and twice on Thursdays and is ten minutes to clear a large number of enemies with increasing difficulty, if cleared, an extreme mode is opened, and after that, a challenge mode to increase points and standing in the alliance. There are Alliance Tournaments and Conquests, wherein alliances battle each other. Battleworld is available as the devs allow with ten entries per day wherein a player chooses a team of five to fight another player’s team of five. Co-op Play, which has a randomized team up or a private one, allows three players with higher level characters to battle a boss. World Boss Invasion is another co-op mode wherein three players randomly team up with teams of three to take down a boss. Giant Boss Raid is an advanced team up mode with lobbies or quick start to take down a boss. And finally, Story is the campaign mode for Future Fight, where the majority of the character biometrics are and has the easiest characters to get. The battles get progressively harder and each one allows a player to gain up to 10 specific biometrics a day per battle.
All modes have different rewards but all the rewards are worth getting. And almost all modes include some story through text. There are also special event modes that happen every once in a while. There are two major types of currency in the game: gold and crystals. Gold is earned in almost all modes of play. Crystals have a base earning of 25 a day through challenges plus 30 every eight days. Gold is used in upgrading characters and purchasing some items. Crystals are used for purchasing more premium items, such as some uniforms and deluxe modes. Some of these modes have auto-play and repeat, but the best ones only have manual play.
The Progression:
I’ve been playing this game for more than a year and tracked progress for six months on unlocking and ranking up characters and you can see in the chart the rate at which this happened.
This chart shows the rate at which the player leveled up in the same time period. The max is 60 with a max of 120 energy.
This chart shows the expected rate of crystal acquirement to 6600, which is the amount needed to unlock a deluxe mode of play, versus the actual amount of time it took to reach that number of crystals. This is because crystals can be earned as rewards from other modes of play and because the devs sometimes give them to players for free for special occasions. It is possible to spend money to advance progression, but since very few of the modes are actually competitive in nature, I didn’t see much use in spending the money to do so. I’m more than a year in and am finally hitting a character progression slow down. I won’t even say it is a wall. I also believe that the progression is half the fun of this game, so don’t bother spending your money to advance characters. I’m frequently top of charts without having spent money on progression. It maybe took longer, but I’m a patient person and enjoyed the journey. This game isn’t very squeezy when it comes to how it deals with players. Not comparatively anyway. And on the subject of money.
Monetization:
There are many ways to pay for things in Future Fight. There are six sections to the store. In the featured shop, are the Deluxe Epic Quests, which give you a new character that you can’t get anywhere else and a new game mode, along with crystals and gold. These are purchased with crystals. The legendary Battle extreme packages, which are also purchased with crystals. There are various packs with different materials as well for crystals. Then there are the actual money packs, the most expensive being $99.99. Do not buy this. Seriously.
Under the Acquire/Upgrade Characters section of the store is Adam Warlock, Emma Frost, Sabertooth, and Iceman, this is the only place you can get them, and they are available for crystals. This is also where the loot box for characters is. The Premium Hero Chest is available for crystals, but it is not a guaranteed premium hero. The Recharge section of the store is where you pick up your free daily energy and holds the one pack I believe is worth having: Get 20 Biometrics Daily for 30 days. It is $9.99 and if you’re smart about it, you can get a lot of premium heroes during that time. The exclusive characters are Enchantress, Carnage, Hyperion, Spider-man 2099, Quasar, Luna Snow, Killmonger, Nadia Van Dyne, Ghost Panther, Sentinel, Ironheart, Kid Kaiju, Agent Venom, Nick Fury, Rescue, Electro, Aero, Slapstick, and Crescent. All others can be acquired elsewhere. There is the X-Gene version of this but currently it only has eight characters, and only seven of those are exclusive to that pack. Those are: Magik, Weapon Hex, Juggernaut, Jubilee, Namor, Kitty Pryde, and Gambit. The Mission Shop also has these daily packs as well as some others. The Token shop uses special in-game currency, and the Uniform shop uses both gold and crystals. Uniforms make your characters stronger and they look different. However, not all characters have uniforms available and some base looks are just cooler than the uniform options. This is also where you will find five gender swaps: those are for the Ancient One, Captain America, Ghost, Deadpool, and Loki. Unlike the Marvel Heroes MMO, gender swaps are not locked entirely behind a pay wall, since in the MMO, premium currency was not earn-able in game and gender swap costumes were only available for premium currency. My biggest complaint against that dead game. There is a lot that you can buy in Marvel Future Fight, but really only buy the 20 Biometrics Daily for 30 days. You get to choose the biometrics every day, so you always know what you are getting. If the X-gene version ever has more characters, then it will be worth it too. However, it is sometimes still possible to get these heroes without spending money. How? They’re exclusive. Well, sometimes the devs run special events where you can earn biometrics for a character of their choosing and sometimes they just give you a premium hero chest or random premium hero. They are often generous with freebees in this game.
Issues:
The most common problem with this game is network failure. It usually boots the player to the home screen or kicks them out of an attempt to complete a battle of some kind. However, every once in a while a different issue occurs. The Angel Dimension Rift used to get characters stuck in their run and some of the Special Missions do that with specific characters. Probably the worst bug I ever saw was when I did a World Boss Invasion, won, but it never went to the Victory screen, the boss was gone because we’d killed him but nothing happened after we did, so the timer ran out and we got Mission Failure, even though we had 100% completion and I was actually the leader. It was very annoying.
Other issues are spelling and grammar errors in the story dialogue. Really silly ones that I wonder if they are ever going to fix. They probably don’t even know they’re there. One game play issue is inventory management. It is a huge chunk of the time spent in the game. All players have 600 slots and some things stack and some things don’t. Custom Gear, ISO-8s, and Cards do not stack, which means a player spends a lot of time upgrading with these items. You can spend 100 crystals to expand the inventory 10 slots, but considering that one Dimension Rift instance could fill ten slots, that’s a bit weak in my opinion. While it may be tempting to do so to clear up space, I wouldn’t ever suggest selling Biometrics, as once a player upgrades a character’s gear to 15, biometrics are needed to upgrade them further. There is no warning of this, and that brings me to my other issue. Tutorial. This game has a pseudo tutorial but it very obviously was designed before a bunch of other stuff was added to the game. New modes and higher level character management are not explained in it. Players typically have to find game guides to really know these things.
Autoplay can be somewhat annoying in that it doesn’t just give rewards like some other games do. Instead, the computer plays the battle for you in real time, so your device is tied up with doing battles. While it is nice that autoplay doesn’t have to be turned on every time you go start a battle, it would be better if it just collected rewards or gave a fail state. Now some people argue that games shouldn’t have auto-collect, autoplay, or repeat at all, but these freemium mobile device games are games for the busy person, the kind of person who doesn’t have six hours a day just to play a video game, so these features are helpful if like me you work 45 hours a week and have three or four side projects on top of that as well as the urge to eat and sleep like a healthy person. On a scale of 1-10 on how helpful Future Fights’ autoplay features are to the busy person, I’d say that Future Fight lands in the middle at a 5. Helpful, but could be much more helpful.
When it comes to actually playing the game, what is both good and bad is the fact that skills don’t queue. You can interrupt a skill, which is good if that skill is not helping you, but isn’t good if you don’t know the character’s skill animations. Some skills, the worst ones, seem uninterruptible by the player. They just go on forever unless the enemy does something to interrupt it. The only thing the player can do it seems is move the character to make them stop using the skill. Kinda dumb.
Some characters are not fun to play as, either because the tempos of their skills are much slower than other characters, the characters are weak no matter how much a player pumps them up, or they just stand there to complete their skills. The best characters are those who move a lot, improve a decent amount during upgrading, and complete skill animation at a fast tempo.
But how do you know which ones are good and which ones are bad? Well, don’t expect the Team sorting feature to help you figure that out. This is probably one of my biggest gripes with Future Fight. Team sorting is done by Tier, Level, or Rank. There isn’t one for damage or threat or some other noun that means how powerful the characters are in a fight, so there is no way to sort them by how effective they actually are. Scarlett Witch and Deadpool Jean Grey and Rachel Summers are probably my most powerful characters right now, but no sort function puts them at the top. That’s stupid. It’s not like it’s impossible. Other games do it. Just add it in Netmarble. Each of the different game modes also seems to effect the sort, putting all of the characters in a different order. Damned if I know what defines that sort, because it frankly seems random. For example, in a recent update, they changed how characters sort for World Boss, putting specific characters at the top when they are clearly weaker than those that come after them. Before the update, it was a lot easier to know who was actually strong enough to beat the World Boss, because the Recommended Attack number could be in the normal or easy range and still be a losing battle. Yes, that Recommended Attack rating is broken too. They keep updating things, and while the new content is great, the UI changes aren’t always for the better. Just saying.
Best Things:
Two great things about this game are the freebees that are given quite regularly and the new game play that is added all the time. Log-in calendars are generous, giving out biometrics, rank-up and mega rank-up tickets, characters, tier-2 tickets, and premium currency. Holiday and update premiers also include rewards for players. Most of all, the new game modes; I’ve seen them premier five new game modes, and more game content on previous modes happens at a good pace with much of it just being free. They even have added story chapters. When they were premiering the X-Force game mode, I was certain, absolutely certain, that Deadpool was going to be a 20 biometrics daily only character. Instead, the day of the update arrives, and they just give everyone Deadpool. It was great. Other games, which will currently remain nameless (Injustice 2 Mobile – or not at all nameless), would have locked Deadpool behind a heavy paywall. Not so with Netmarble. They said “You like Deadpool?” Yes. “Well, here’s Deadpool!” Cool! Thanks! They kind of hurt themselves when they did the next Epic Quest, First Family. “You like Mr. Fantastic?” No–“Well, here’s Mr. Fantastic!” Uh, thanks. I guess. The point is many your absolute favorites are outright given to you or are so easy to get. On top of that, they’re making new original characters, such as the Sharon Rogers Captain America, who looks like such a badass with each new uniform, Luna Snow, White Fox, and Crescent, who are all draws for the South Korean audience, but are still really cool, and the four combo characters, Ghost Panther, Weapon Hex, Arachknight, and Iron Hammer. This combination of traditional favorites for free and original characters as well is really good.
Recommendation:
I don’t like giving online games an actual rating because the games change too much, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, sometimes in a mixed fashion, over time for that rating to always apply. Especially after the debacle of some triple A games waiting until after the reviews were out to up their microtransaction squeeze (Black Ops 4). I think really only a recommendation can be given for an online game and ratings apply to single-player games or mostly single-player-like games. Otherwise, I don’t trust online games enough to give them rating. They are simply too fluid. Future Fight has given me a good amount of fun and Netmarble obviously cares enough to value their two major markets equally and seems to understand how to work with them both, which is pretty impressive.
Since I play this game everyday, and look forward to it everyday, it may come as no surprise that I would recommend Future Fight. If you have a possible gambling problem, I would not suggest it because it does have some mild loot boxes, that won’t bother those without the inclination, but will definitely effect those with the condition. Overall though, it is fun, it’s great to unlock and rank up characters through hard work and the freebees make you feel welcomed by the devs. It’s also great for people like me who like project management and analytics, because you can plan out upgrades methodically, so it meets the needs of the spreadsheet lover in a flashy way. It’s definitely for the Marvel fans out there. And I wouldn’t suggest it for the more action minded out there. Yes, I love this game. I will continue to play it, and I hope that the devs keep up the good work.
Alex Miceli
The Empathetic Writer 