Above is a picture of my phone’s home screen where all of my most used, important apps live. There’s nothing out of the ordinary except for one recently made vacant spot. The space used to have an app in it, one that was enjoyed daily until a recent update to the app set any good will I previously had towards it into a black hole.
Allow me to back up. I’m enjoying my Sunday on my couch, light breeze in the air, sippin’ tea in hand, ready to settle in for a spell with my current favorite Marvel mobile game, Marvel: Avengers Alliance 2. I notice I’m one mission away from completing Spec Op 1 and acquiring Ant-Man. Why, I do believe I would like mister Scott Lang added to my roster of heroes, I think to myself.
I click on the mission, start it, the game crashes midway taking my ‘energy’ resource with it. I shrug it off, because as any player of Marvel: Avengers Alliance 2 knows, this game likes to crash more often than anytime I play Grand Theft Auto. I load the mission again, it crashes. I restart my phone, the mission crashes. I reinstall the game, the mission crashes. I switch to my iPad Air, the mission crashes. Suffice it to say, as the game is now, I can’t recruit a digital Paul Rudd not because of any lack of skill, not because of lack of in-game resources, but because the game itself is broken.
I’m not the only one to run into game breaking issues with the recent June 28th patch to Marvel: Avengers Alliance 2 as their iTunes review section is now a dumpster fire of unhappy players.
This isn’t to say that the patch and recent major content updates weren’t off to a fine start. Various icons and items were updated with crisper artwork, an auto play function was added for those of us who multitask and the new Chapter 4 missions are fun and challenging. The new characters added over the last few PVP tournaments have been great additions, including Sharon “Free turns every turn, I do what I want, YOU DON’T KNOW MY LIFE” Carter as a stand out. The content, assuming you can reach it, is solid, well paced gameplay.
The downside is the recent updates also brought a renewed focus on spending real world money on in-game perks. The store has been revamped to show off in-game purchases front and center with your earned resources pushed off to the right hand corner. The amount of Gold distributed via completing tasks has been changed from set amounts to random. That means that instead of getting a definite amount every time, it’s up to the whim of the game to determine how little your reward is. While this is a minor annoyance and expected of most Free-To-Play games, any shift to a blatant Pay-to-Win model is concerning. So far I’ve been able to play the game and access everything I want without paying a dime but there’s no telling how long that will last.
Marvel, Playdom, listen to your audience. We love your game, we want it to be good and we hate seeing it ruined by messy updates. Marvel: Avengers Alliance 2 used to be one of my favorite new Marvel mobile games to come out in recent memory but until they fix their latest patch, the vacant spot on my home screen is less rage inducing than the crashing nightmare that used to be there. I expect this from lesser games, but if a product has the Marvel name associated with it, at the bare minimum, a player should expect the game to function. Until the game gets patched correctly, in Marvel: Avengers Alliance 2 you can’t count on that.
Played on iOS 9.3.2 on an iPhone 6 & iPad Air