Recent reviews by Alpha

Everything wrong with early access in a nutshell, avoid at all costs.

Note: I have spent quite abit of money on this game so this review may be biased.

I said to myself I'd do a review of this if I ever hit 1000 hours... I just did so here it is!
I was recommended this game from a friend around a year ago because I wanted an ARPG to play, I had already brought Grim Dawn but that was still being worked on.
I started playing when it was still called Marvel Heros and got the feeling they changed the name because at launch this game was really, really bad and had to 'reset' the reviews of their game but it's actually changed for the better since then.

Gameplay is just like any other ARPG, you level up and gain active skills and passive ones that are iconic to your character which scale in damage off level and gear of that character.
From my personal experience I started off playing during a new event they added called 'Don't fear the reaper', in which loot drop were tweaked immensely and it was just overall chaos everywhere, however, once the event ended that week everything just felt so slow, so grindy and it just felt like getting off a sugar rush. I wanted more so after playing my first character, Colossus[marvel.com], I brought a random hero box and got Daredevil[marvel.com] which I couldn't get into but got to max level as you gain a permanent % EXP bonus from doing so. Characters have a wide arange of powers, you may seem some similarities between the powers from different heroes other than your own but may inflict different effects or have damage amplifiers on them.
The best thing I would suggest you do is to pick your favorite Marvel character and work from there, it's not hard unlocking other characters but unlocking specific ones you want might take you awhile. New characters are being released monthly although there might be a small delay between them and old characters are being tweaked during their '52' review, where the character goes through a massive quality of life improvement.

There is a decent enough plot to the Story Mode in the game but thats not really required for you to run through it, other activities can range from going through the games dungeons known as Terminals and mini-stories 'Oneshots', which have 1-3 bosses in them that drop super rare loot. Raids, which house the hardest (if you can call them that) bosses and Patrol Sectors, which have endless amount of enemies to defeat and ever-spawning boss waves every 3-4 minutes with other randomly spawning bosses.
In essence this game is a PvE MMO-ARPG (Player verses Environment Massively Multiplayer Online Action Role-playing Game) which almost no Player vs. Player content. There IS a Player vs. Player gamemode but it is not the focus of this game and in my opinion is not worth your time.

Nope. There are numerous Boosts you can buy that effect the Rare and Special item find % but there is no way to increase your damage output with any sold boost.
Characters are brought with real money or Eternity Splinters, in game currency used at a vendor to unlock them, character prices range from 200 to 600 or you can try your luck and throw caution into the wind by buying a random hero box, the chances are that you might get a 600 splinter hero practically saving you 425 splinters in the long run. Eternity Splinters drop roughly every 8 minutes from random enemies or bosses, using some Boosts can effect on how many drop but not the time in which they do (I've had a massive explosion of 20 splinters afew times).

It's only going to get bigger.
They have tons of new characters coming out for 2015 and a revamped Team-up system that includes MORE team-ups being release throughout this time.
Events are held almost weekly, ranging from Cosmic Chaos, Odins Bounty, Operation Omega and A.R.M.O.R. incursion more may even crop up.

Told you it'll be biased.
In all seriousness this game is worth a download, play it for acouple of days and seen how you like it.

Note: This review is not complete, may be expanded upon later and may not reflect the product on offical release

An Early Access, Free to Play (£14.99 - £29.99 or region equivalent at present time) title that we're privileged to help test to get rid of all those nasty bugs and hackers so that we can actually have fun... Somewhere 9-12 months down the line.

I've only ever had fun by playing with friends as meeting random people will often mean you'll die to an arrow in the back or front, depending on how scummy that person can be. Already ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ about killing on sight? Well that topic is so subjective and apparent that everyone has to at some point because lets face it, at this point Zombies are pretty much a joke in games like this, only serving as filler or minor annoyances where the bigger threat are Bears Players. The game play in this game needs to be polished so hard that you'd see your reflection, while wearing sunglasses. You'd think at one point with all the previous titles of this same genre developers would catch onto 'what to add in a zombie survival game', such as a small party feature for people on your friends list with an increased re-spawn timer to compensate for spawning near them perhaps? There's an idea you can have for free. The last thing I want to do in such a game is keep using the /respawn and /loc command to find friends, completely destroying any immersion and fun I might actually find in a title like this.
The loot spawns are being tweeked throughout the development so finding any sort of weapon or firearm is such a chore you may as well just keep re-spawning till you get a Pleasant Valley spawn and then try your luck in the only Police Station on the map, which is most likely picked clean or has 3-6 people already there with guns pointing at all the doors. Crafting in the game is mundane and easy and the fact you can pull up a wiki in the steam overlay destroys any sense of deeply exploring it. There is no endgame, no missions to fulfill and no score tab to keep track of, so you're going to need to make your own 'fun'. Quest items do drop that lead you to a quest loot crate which you can get a bundle of goodies from but that's like finding a needle in a haystack. Another feature (as we've seen in numerous other games) is building a base but it is so unrewarding, as people can stack multiple furnace's and climb over the walls to your camp, so it's better living as traveling nomads which my group of friends find this fun as we're usually running around chanting and throwing spears at people like the Zulu still do did back in the day.
I've tried playing solo, creating my own little boarded up shack while searching nearby houses for hats I can convert into Brown Outback Hats and Cold medicine I can make into 'Swizzle' (Fictional drug) and try to sell them to random people I see... They don't really negotiate and tend to draw a bow on me because there's not alot to do rather than murder everyone.

This title caught alot of flak on release, much more than it should have in my opinion due to the nature of airdrops and the evidence on numerous gaming media websites months prior to release saying that there will be weapons contained inside. Airdrops are for the most part, Pay to Gamble, as you'd need to be on a High/ Very High populated server to call them in. You'd also need to have a small group of friends with weapons so you can actually have a chance at getting the items you may or may not get as the crates themselves are pretty much RNG 10% to get a gun, 65% to get screwed, 12.5% to be the life of the party[h1z1.gamepedia.com], you'd need to watch out for other people as well when you get close because they can see the airdrop too.
So not only are airdrops Pay to Gamble it's also Pay to Murder or get murdered in the sense you get a chance to kill all the people that flock to that position. So if you have a gullible friend with deep pockets, you may get a laugh or two at the expense (literally) at others.

I'm not praising or condemning it, F2P titles need to make money bro, gotta milk the herd for what their worth before they get sent to the slaughter house (Quite literally as you lose everything upon death). On the subject of longevity SOE GDC [Saving these brackets for the next acronym] has suffered just recently in the form of layoffs and restructuring but don't worry this wont effect the lifespan of H1Z1 *cough* as the Everquest franchise took the hit for us. Layoffs that are known; I'm not trying to stir ♥♥♥♥ or sidetrack this review but this is a big thing and it's sending red flags up for me when this game comes to mind. It's always a shame when someone loses their job, even more so when products are just being released and are continually being developed.
Moving on... You would've thought that a company that has a list of F2P titles would include F2P currency in its new title for testing. Not a chance right now, there's money to be made. Well, to give them credit I did find event ticket in a fridge once which to my knowledge is used in their Battle Royale gamemode, where up to 100 people brutally murder and betray each other in an effort to win account bound items. So if I'm not getting shot over trying to sell fictional drugs to people in the other game mode, I may as well get shot trying to get cosmetic items in the Hunger Games.
Another form of pocket money wasting is in the form of keys you can buy for crates that you win in Battle Royale, I think they might also be lootable items in the regular open world mode but I haven't seen one yet. These unlock account bound cosmetics but as it stands right now if you get a duplicate of what you already have, you're out of luck as there is no re-roll option or 'dupe' crafting (Where you take multiple dupes to make a new item).

Don't. Just don't. We're already testing the water on this title and it's pretty murky. Maybe when it goes fully F2P it might be worth your time.