TL;DR: A wildly fun comic-book beat ’em up with fantastic tag-team action and a great roster, held back by too much chatter and barely-there progression. Great campaign, less replayable Arcade, still an easy recommendation.

have spent an embarrassing portion of my life punching digital henchmen in the face. Some kids grew up on Mario, some got spiritually baptized by Final Fantasy, and I was the one in the arcade corner, hogging the X-Men cabinet until a mall security guard tapped my shoulder and said they were closing. So when Marvel Cosmic Invasion popped into my inbox—its pitch a mixture of ninety-percent nostalgia and ten-percent cosmic bug infestation—I felt like I was being handed a mixtape from the universe with a Post-it that read: I remember who you were in 1997. And yes, I put that tape straight into the stereo.

From its opening minutes, Cosmic Invasion makes a pretty loud case for itself as Marvel’s first earnest attempt at a proper beat ’em up in ages. It wears its inspirations like patches on a denim vest, proudly flaunting its Marvel vs. Capcom love letter while throwing me into neon-washed cityscapes, cosmic wastelands, and a Wakanda rendered with such arcade vibrancy you half expect it to smell like carpeted arcades and stale popcorn. This game wants to be a Saturday morning cartoon you can punch your way through, and in the early hours, it almost gets there. Almost.

The setup is standard comic-book calamity: Annihilus wakes up on the wrong side of the Negative Zone and decides to dump his insectoid swarm across every reachable cosmic nook. The twist is that he’s also sprinkling mind-control bugs on villains far and wide, a convenient excuse for the designers to throw nearly the entire Marvel rogues gallery at your face. What I did not expect was how committed the game is to playing this straight as both homage and spectacle. Every level feels like someone is unrolling a laminated poster of a Marvel location, dropping two heroes onto it, and saying: go make a mess.

My first few runs felt like opening up an action figure bin I hadn’t touched in years. Fifteen playable heroes doesn’t sound like a revolution until you begin swapping them like a fighting-game fiend at last call. The tag-team system lifts just enough from Marvel vs. Capcom to feel like it belongs in the same multiverse, letting me start a combo as Venom, tag into Nova, call Venom back in for an assist, then juggle a room full of bug-people into the stratosphere. It’s the most gleefully chaotic the game ever gets, and when the rhythm hits—when the screen becomes a blur of knock-ups and supers—it’s maybe the best beat ’em up action Marvel has ever had its name on.

And then the characters start talking.

Look, I enjoy Marvel’s quippy personality as much as the next person raised on a steady diet of Chris Evans eyebrow lifts, but Cosmic Invasion leans on banter like it’s being paid per syllable. Some of the lines are funny, some are fine, and some repeat so often I began to feel like I was trapped in a cosmic sitcom on an endless loop. She-Hulk, in particular, insists on breaking the fourth wall so aggressively that by hour five, I felt like she was crawling out of the Nintendo Switch to remind me that yes, she noticed that reference too. There’s a version of this script that lands like a charming comic-panel aside, but Cosmic Invasion barrels past that line and keeps going until it’s practically mugging.

And then there’s the absence of the one move beat ’em up purists like me consider sacred: the universal grab.

When a genre spans decades, certain mechanics become gospel, and grabbing a goon by the collar to slam them into the asphalt is as holy as it gets. So when I realized only a handful of characters—Wolverine, She-Hulk, a couple of others—get a functional grab, a small part of my arcade-raised soul winced. It’s not that the combat becomes bad; the basic movesets are solid, the supers are flashy, and juggling feels fantastic. But without a universal grab, close-quarters exchanges lose the tight, tactile satisfaction that made classics like Streets of Rage or TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge feel so controlled, so precise. Cosmic Invasion gives you power but withholds finesse, and you feel the absence every time a swarm gets too cozy.

The most surprising disappointment, though, is the progression—or lack thereof. You can level up your heroes, but you don’t unlock anything meaningful. No new moves. No new combos. No real sense of evolution. Just modest stat bumps and passive perks that barely register. When you have a roster this varied and a tag-system this fun, not giving players a deeper growth arc feels like leaving dessert on the counter untouched. It’s fine for a single campaign run, but it makes the Arcade mode feel strangely hollow, a flashy machine with no escalating reward loop to fuel the replay addiction this genre thrives on.

But it’s not all quips and missed potential. The game absolutely nails its selection of heroes and villains in a way that feels both lovingly researched and slightly unhinged. Sure, you get the big hitters like Thanos and Galactus, but the designers also reach into the dusty corners of Marvel history and pull out Sauron, a pterodactyl man whose life mission is to turn people into dinosaurs. When I realized I could pummel mind-controlled supervillains alongside Beta Ray Bill and Phyla-Vell, I felt like the game was letting me in on some deep-cut secret handshake. It’s the kind of non-safe choice that makes the universe feel far wider than the familiar MCU spotlight.

The campaign, sixteen levels deep with branching paths, works beautifully as an introductory tour of the roster. Every stage subtly nudges you toward a suggested duo through dialogue and enemy patterns, but it never forces your hand. If I wanted to drag Wolverine into cosmic Asgard nonsense, no one stopped me. If I wanted to take Captain America and Rocket Raccoon into a fight that made absolutely no canonical sense, the game shrugged and said sure, knock yourself out. These character-agnostic doorways give the campaign a breezy experimentation vibe that Arcade mode cannot quite replicate. That lack of forced choice is a gift.

Where it stumbles, though, is pacing. Some levels drag because their optional challenges feel like chores, and that’s when the endless quips really begin to sandpaper the senses. There’s only so many times you can hear the same self-aware fourth-wall joke during a flying-beast gauntlet before you start to wonder whether the bugs invading the universe got into the writer’s room too.

But the game deserves credit for its commitment to spectacle. Boss fights consistently surprise, environments pop with that hyper-saturated ’90s cartoon flair, and each hero feels mechanically distinct in a way many brawlers never achieve. I never once confused playing as Captain Marvel with playing as Spidey; every hero has a rhythm, a weight, a flow, and in the moments when everything clicks, Cosmic Invasion feels like the Marvel beat ’em up I always pictured in my head as a kid.

And yet—because there’s always an “and yet” with a game that comes this close—the lack of character progression really does kneecap its longevity. I finished the campaign grinning, but when I slipped into Arcade mode, I felt the floor drop out beneath me. Without new skills to unlock or deeper systems to master, that second playthrough feels less like a new journey and more like a rerun. A fun rerun, sure, but one that ends before the credits.

Does Marvel Cosmic Invasion give Marvel fans the beat ’em up they’ve been waiting for? I think so. The campaign alone is absolutely worth the ride, bursting with personality, spectacle, and a tag-team system that occasionally transcends its own chaos. But it also stops one notch short of greatness, undone by quip overload, some odd mechanical omissions, and a progression system that barely exists. It’s a cosmic feast missing just one course.

Still, I’m glad it exists. I’m glad someone handed these characters to a team willing to swing big, take risks, and dig into the weird corners of Marvel lore. And even if the game doesn’t quite become an all-timer, it nails something even rarer: it feels like it was made by people who love this genre as much as I do. That alone earns a second look.

Verdict

Marvel Cosmic Invasion is an energetic, lovingly-crafted throwback brawler that shines brightest in its tag-team combat and eclectic roster, even if constant quips and shallow progression keep it from the upper echelon of the genre. It’s a joyous campaign experience with a slightly flat arcade aftertaste, the sort of game that makes you smile in spite of its missteps. If you’ve ever dreamed of the Marvel universe filtered through ’90s arcade electricity, this is worth your time.