Bottom Line: NetEase built the hero shooter Blizzard forgot to keep building — a fast, generous, gorgeously chaotic Marvel brawler whose seasonal machine is starting to grind against its own players. Play it now, before the matchmaking gets under your skin.
The Gameplay Loop
Rivals moves fast. Faster than Overwatch, less punishing than Valorant, with a third-person camera that makes the flashy super abilities read as spectacle rather than a wall of first-person particle soup. You pick objective maps — payload escorts, control points, the usual competitive furniture — and the round-to-round rhythm is comfort food for anyone who's played the genre. Fight over a point, wipe a team, push, repeat. It's not reinventing the objective. It doesn't need to.
Where it earns its keep is the character design. NetEase clearly understood the assignment: these heroes need to feel like their comic-book selves. Spider-Man is a nightmare of mobility, zipping across the arena and diving backlines with the slippery aggression his fans demand. Doctor Strange bends space. Jeff the Land Shark — an unlikely breakout star — can swallow an entire enemy squad and spit them off a cliff, which is either the funniest or most infuriating thing in the game depending on which end of the shark you're on. The kits have personality. That's harder to engineer than it sounds, and it's the single biggest reason players stayed.
The Team-Up system is the mechanical thesis, and it's a good one. By tying bonus abilities to specific hero combinations, NetEase incentivizes you to think about your team composition as a system rather than a pile of individual picks. When it clicks — when your squad is stacked with pairings that amplify each other — Rivals delivers the coordinated-teamfight high that the genre chases. When it doesn't, you feel the absence, and the temptation to force a pairing your team doesn't want is a real source of lobby friction.
Then there's destruction. It's not a gimmick, but it's not the revolution the marketing implies either. Blowing a hole in a wall to expose an entrenched Strategist is satisfying and occasionally decisive. But the maps are engineered to funnel you back toward the objective regardless of how much rubble you create, so the tactical depth has a ceiling. It adds texture. It doesn't rewrite the playbook.
Onboarding and Friction
For newcomers, the onboarding is generous by genre standards — the role system is intuitive, and the Marvel branding means players arrive already knowing whether they want to be the tank or the assassin. The trouble starts later. The roster's size, once a selling point, becomes a wall of characters to learn, and the Team-Up meta rewards knowledge that new players simply don't have yet.
And here is the crack running through the foundation: matchmaking. The lifetime Steam sentiment sits at a healthy Mostly Positive (~77%), but the recent 30-day window has cooled to Mixed (~64%), and the reason is written all over the reviews. Players allege "bot lobbies" — matches suspiciously stacked with weak opponents — and "rigged" win/loss streaks engineered to keep engagement on a leash. Whether or not the algorithm is doing what players think it's doing, the perception is corrosive. A competitive game runs on trust that your losses were earned and your wins were real. When that trust erodes, the fun goes with it, and no amount of Marvel gloss papers over the feeling that the match was decided before you spawned.
Balance is the other recurring wound. A roster this large, expanding every season, is a live-service balancing nightmare, and Rivals shows the strain — dominant picks, undertuned heroes, and the whiplash of patches that swing the meta hard. It's the price of the seasonal engine, but players pay it in frustration.