Last night saw the release of Marvel Rivals, NetEase’s new hero shooter in a landscape that seems ready to kill all newcomers.

Well, it may be that an old hero marksman will be killed or at least significantly damaged instead. That would of course be Overwatch, Blizzard’s long-running multiplayer shooter, which has “upgraded” itself with the number 2 and some big changes and new characters, but few have really accepted this as a true sequel.

After the full release of Marvel Rivals yesterday, Overwatch should actually be scared of Marvel Rivals, because it’s more than just hype now, it’s here.

The start of the game couldn’t have gone better. Rivals peaked at 444,000 players at launch on PC alone, not to mention consoles. And miraculously, the release went incredibly smoothly. At least in my experience, there were no login queues, no game wait times, no lags, and no disconnections. Zero. That’s…basically unthinkable when releasing a truly new online game, but NetEase somehow pulled it off.

The game is simply outstanding. Even as someone who hasn’t played Overwatch in several years at this point, it feels like I first logged into this game and experimented with heroes all those years ago, only this time I’m playing around with 33 Marvel Heroes and villains, all with decades of history.

I was a bit skeptical about the idea of ​​turning the game into a third person perspective as it seemed like some kind of trick to sell skins in the store, but in practice it plays great and it’s easy to see that characters like Black Panther, Wolverine or Hulk wouldn’t do that were almost as fun in first person mode. It really helps, it’s not just a microtransaction trick.

It’s rightly hard to imagine Marvel Rivals not filtering out a significant portion of Overwatch’s player base, which is already struggling to retain players after all these years, botching both the release of a sequel and long-promised PvE content that years of work were then erased. It’s not good news for Blizzard when Overwatch makes up a large part of their IP roster these days, and while competition can make anyone better, Rivals certainly does So It’s a good thing the term “Overwatch killer” doesn’t seem so exaggerated compared to how it’s commonly used in other games in other situations.

Marvel Rivals has momentum, but also what you might call “the juice.” Everything from the art direction to the gameplay to the Menus is outstanding and in a landscape of dead multiplayer shooters it feels like it really makes an impression. And in many ways, put that mark directly on Overwatch.

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