As a lifelong Marvel fan, I feel as though it is my duty to give this game a fair and honest review. I’ve been playing this game on a daily basis for over three years now, and I can say that it has come a long way.
About Marvel Strike Force
Marvel Strike Force (MSF) is a turn-based strategy RPG mobile game available on Android and iOS where players get to collect and power up their favorite Marvel characters . Produced by developers FoxNext and Scopely, MSF first debuted in March of 2018 to the tune of $150 million in revenue during its first year.
It was nominated for “Mobile Game of the Year” at the SXSW Gaming Awards and was awarded Best Breakthrough game of the year in 2019 by Google Play. The game can be played solo or cooperatively because the game features an alliance system that allows you to coordinate assaults on other teams, reach milestones, and protect the universe together.
The world is under attack by Ultimus and hordes of his sinister villains. You, an agent of S.T.R.I.K.E (Special Tactical Reserve for Interdimensional Key Events), have been tasked with assembling teams to combat evil forces.
Overall, this is not a heavily story-driven game. Your main focus is powering up characters to compete in various game modes. There will be a little cutscene when new campaign nodes or game modes are introduced, but there’s really no reason to get fully invested.
Black Bolt prior to be unlocked as a playable character.
When it comes to characters, there is certainly no shortage. MSF currently features more than 250 characters with new characters being added every two weeks. In order to power up your favorite characters, you will need to unlock them by collecting character shards. The number of shards needed and the method of collecting them will vary from character to character.
You are also able to customize some of your characters with costumes. Costumes are another unlockable aspect of the game that will grant an alternate outfit or visual. For example, the traditional Vision and Scarlet Witch are in the game as default characters, but you can unlock their vintage black and white depictions from WandaVision.
Aside from collecting characters and dressing them up, you have the opportunity to increase their utility. To help characters (or toons as the MSF community refers to them) reach their maximum potential, you will need to collect resources such as gear and gold. Each piece of equipment and level will increase its power, which directly impacts their effectiveness in combat.
Resources are collected through various methods such as farming from campaign nodes, purchasing in the various stores, and earning through milestones. This can become a bit of a hassle because your resources determine how many toons you can power up and by how much. At times, a bottleneck of resources will happen when a new string of toons release that require the same type of resource.
The good news is that new toons are being released regularly, which means there’s always something to do. The bad news is that it makes it difficult to power them all up due to a lack of resources.
There are multiple gear tiers that require specific resources. The classes that determine gear are bio, mystic, skill, mutant, and tech, but there are other traits associated with each character that may be used for specific events and synergies.
Whether your goal is creating the strongest meta toons or powering up your favorite character, there will always be something to work toward and look forward to.
Marvel Strike Force in-game combat system featuring S.H.I.E.L.D Medic, Luke Cage, and Spiderman against Mercenary minions.
At the time of writing this, the max level is 100. I get that 100 seems like a standard max level if you’re familiar with video games. However, this is a recent change. Characters can only be as high as your commander level (you, the S.T.R.I.K.E. agent also has a level). Think of yourself as the leader and all of your minions are forbidden to be stronger than you.
The max level will periodically increase by five levels. By periodically, I mean maybe once a year. At launch, max level was set at level 80, and it has taken until 2024 to reach the level 100 cap.
As I mentioned, gear tiers and level will impact your characters’ power level, but you’re able to power them up even further by collecting character shards, red stars, and diamonds.
This seems like a lot of new information, but I’ll break it down. You can have a maximum of seven (yellow) stars. Each yellow star rank requires a certain number of character shards to achieve (i.e. 300 character shards increase from six stars to seven stars).
Unfortunately, these are not total shards. Each star rank requires more shards, but luckily, they do not change from character to character. The only difference comes with the amount of character shards it takes to unlock a character.
Each star rank comes with a multiplier for your character’s power level. So, the higher the star rank, the higher the multiplier bonus.
Red stars, on the other hand, add an additional multiplier that will only be applied if you have unlocked that yellow star.. Otherwise, the star rank will be hollow with a red outline and no bonus will be applied until it is unlocked.
Diamonds, unlike the other two, are a recent feature that require you to have seven yellow stars AND seven red stars on a character before the bonus will be applied.
The last factor contributing to power is its abilities. As is common in many video games, you are able to increase the level of basic, special, ultimate, and passive abilities. These require a resource called ability materials.
Like I said before, there are many places where a bottleneck can occur based on the number of ways to power up your toons.
The toons you choose to power up generally serve a greater purpose than just being your favorite. Specific toons have synergies with others or are part of a “team” (X-Men, Avengers, Symbiotes, etc.) and have buffs in certain game modes.
Arena mode, a long grind, is where you pick a team of five characters to battle against another commander’s team of five. If you win the battle, you will swap ranks with that player.The goal is to set a strong defense that others cannot defeat while you maul your way to arena rank 1.
In raids, you work with your alliance to battle through nodes over the course of 24 hours to earn milestones and collect resources. Certain characters will receive bonuses or special abilities when participating in a raid node, which will display in their ability description.
Blitz mode, which is the most redundant, allows you to fight against generated teams to earn points towards milestone rewards. You can battle with many teams, but you can only use a character once per cooldown unless you use resources to refresh them.
Real-Time Arena connects you with another commander to do battle in real time! This game mode is interesting because the matchmaking pairs you with a random opponent, and you have to develop a strategy in…real time.
In Alliance War, your alliance will fight against a helicarrier full of enemy defenses from another alliance. You must set your defense while also attacking the enemy helicarrier. War lasts for 24 hours and ends with some pretty decent rewards whether your alliance wins or loses.
There are other limited-time game modes that pop up on a rotational schedule, such as legendary characters, and others that don’t recur. Honestly, when there’s always multiple things going on, and it can be confusing to make sure you’re participating in everything.
MSF Quest/Mission System
As far as quests and missions are concerned, the “missions” are the campaign nodes and limited-time events. Almost everything has a set amount of time to complete in real-life hours. Events may last for 24 hours, but they can also last for an entire month. It really depends on what Scopely has on its timeline.
Most quests coincide with some sort of milestone, and the way to progress the milestones varies. For example, a very repetitive milestone progression is winning blitz battles. It consists of hours of simulating battles with every toon you own while hoping to earn enough points to progress the milestone far enough to obtain the desired resources.
This is where a bot or a really enthusiastic kid would come in handy. Not all milestones are repetitive though. They can have multiple methods of progression such as battling, collecting, or purchasing milestone points.
One of the easiest (or hardest) methods is through collaborative milestones. You and your alliance members complete tasks to contribute to a group milestone which can be claimed by everyone in the alliance. If your group is not active or coordinated, it can make it very difficult to reach the thresholds, but a team effort can yield great rewards.
Members of the Sinister Six Team including Vulture, Doctor Octopus, Rhino, and Mysterio after combat.
The graphics are pretty solid in my opinion. Character design is probably my favorite aspect of the graphics. Each character design is based off of their appearance in comics or the MCU
In combat, you can change the camera to be static or dynamic and can increase the combat speed. Personally, I play most of the time with a static camera and max speed combat because I’m trying to complete everything as quickly as possible. I’ve played long enough that the “stop and smell the flowers” phase is over for me.
Every once in a while, the game reverts my settings back to being dynamic, and I have to admit that the animations look impressive. Each character has a unique set of animations for each attack and special animations when killing another character. As far as superheroes go, the animations are relatively character accurate.
Loading screens are probably some of the coolest graphics though. There are often hints of things to come and feature some of the newest characters.
I’ll let you decide for yourself how the graphics stack up to other mobile games on your list.
MSF Developer
The original developer of the game was FoxNext Games, which was owned by Disney. After a few years, Disney decided to sell off FoxNext games (including MSF), and the developer Scopely picked it up.
Since Scopely acquired FoxNext, the game has had a more regular cadence of character releases, created a blog, and launched a website dedicated to supporting the game. I regularly read the blog that drops every Friday. The website I use daily to collect free resources.
Devs do a good job of updating the game every two or three weeks as they’re releasing new characters or features. The best part is that you can usually count on getting free resources for something going wrong after the update.
It’s a running joke in the MSF community about how the devs must be a bunch of monkeys behind the screen because there’s rarely an update that goes smoothly. Lucky for us, they’re usually pretty generous with the compensation.
Issues can vary from animations not working properly, to milestones points not being tracked accurately, and even the entire game not loading. It can be frustrating with the time limits on events when the game is not working as intended, but they will send in-game messages as well as post on their social channels when an issue arises.
As of recently, devs have been utilizing polls to determine which characters we want to see added to the game, which I think is a great way to get the community involved. There are also a number of influencers, streamers, etc. that they communicate with. That group helps guide MSF in the right direction based on the feedback of upcoming features and game modes.
The best things to come from these groups are often quality of life improvements, which allow us to filter and locate characters and resources more efficiently.
MSF Price
Arguably the best part of the game is its price – FREE! You can download this game from the App Store and Google Play at no cost. However, if you want to compete with the best, you’re going to have to spend some serious cash.
The download may be free, but it can definitely cost you to be competitive. As new characters release, Scopely offers bundles costing $100 and $50 to unlock a character. However, this does not max out the character.
In the in-game store and on the website, you can spend money to purchase resources, gear, and character shards to help improve your roster. This is an easy way for players to skip to the front of the line without the daily grind of farming resources and maxing milestones.
This is probably the most frustrating part of the game for someone who is relatively free-to-play. When a new character releases, you will run into people with the character maxed out before it’s available in milestones because Scopely always releases the cash offers prior to the character's official release.
I get it – they have to make money somehow. However, I feel like it dilutes the game a bit and puts a ceiling on the players who aren’t willing to pay. In my opinion, purchases for games like this should be solely cosmetic with no competitive advantages.
It’s not just the fact that they offer pay-to-win bundles, the prices are steep. In order to get enough resources to craft one piece of high tier gear, it can cost $30+, and you need six pieces of gear to increase a character’s gear tier. This means to upgrade one character from gear tier 17 to gear tier 18 could cost you over $150 if you lack all of the resources.
If you chose to purchase character shards at the time of release, you could dump well over $200 to power up a character, and it still would not be maxed out.
FINAL VERDICT – 7/10
Pros
There is always plenty to do, which gives you a reason to log in and play.
Characters are being released often which means there’s a good chance that you’ll be able to collect your favorites.
Content creators and resources are available to help you strategize.
Devs listen to feedback from the community and give generous compensation for issues.
Graphics and characters are consistent with comics and the MCU.
Cons
To be the best, you have to spend more money. It’s pay-to-win and prices are expensive.
At times too many events are going on that it’s difficult to find time to participate.
Certain milestones are unreachable without spending a lot of time or a lot of money.
With the stature of a giant and the cunning of an elf, I've slipped through the cracks as an atypical gamer. Nestled in the fields of Pennsylvania, I wield my controller until the darkest hours.
Gamer Since:
1998
Favorite Genre:
RPG
Currently Playing:
Baldur's Gate 3
Top 3 Favorite Games:
Baldur's Gate, Fable: The Lost Chapters, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
