Marvel Cosmic Invasion review — A splash page in video game form

Big, bold, flashy, and maybe a little messy – when splash pages show up in a comic book, you know it means business. These overwhelming spreads of art generally emphasize style over substance, solidifying a moment’s impact better than sequenced grids of panels could ever hope to. Appropriately, playing Marvel Cosmic Invasion channels the power of the splash page with bombastic art, flashy fighting mechanics, and even a few endearing flaws to muck things up a little. Cosmic Invasion follows up developer Tribute Games’s work on TMNT: Shredders Revenge excellently as a solid beat-em-up that learns from the pitfalls of its predecessor. 

People are more likely to have watched a Marvel movie than read a Marvel comic book these days, and that reality tends to bleed into the games more and more as time goes on. I’m a comic fan above all else, so technology aside, I can’t help but find Marvel games that predate the MCU’s conquest of culture a little more authentic to the Marvel I love. 

Cosmic Invasion puts the comics first, which is evident from everything to how it looks to how it plays. You simply don’t choose to make Beta Ray Bill a playable character in your game over Thor in the year 2025 unless you’re a true comic scholar. The majority of characters feel pulled directly from their 90s books, which the game leans into by mixing those designs with some Marvel vs. Capcom-isms in their fighting styles that likely drew from the exact same 90s source material. If you’re a big Marvel fan, simply observing how the characters move and what goes on in the background can be a fun game of spotting what the developers were inspired by. 

Most importantly though, this game doesn’t feel frozen in a specific period of time. The game loosely adapts the Annihilation event from the 2000s, the modern Symbiote lore appears in full force, and you can play as Cosmic Ghost Rider of all characters. You can even unlock a Chasm skin for Spider-Man…Chasm just happened! It goes without saying that everyone loves Chasm…maybe not on a writing, creativity, or even basic premise level, but he sure looks cool! By being willing to reach beyond just what people may recognize, Cosmic Invasion captures the authentic kind of Marvel experience that I’ve been missing.

Marvel’s legacy shines through the gameplay as well. While technically anything can happen in the world of Marvel, the brand generally favors two types of games in particular: the beat-em-up and fighting games. These genres carry Marvel in the video game world to this day – Tokon is on the horizon, and you can dress those Spider-Man, Avengers, and Wolverine games up with all the open worlds and cinematics you want, at their core they’re really just fancy beat-em-ups. Cosmic Invasion takes Marvel’s established gaming identities and smashes them together for something that feels right at home for the brand while twisting the genre in a fresh way.

While combining beat-em-ups with fighting game combos has been done more times than Jean Grey has died and come back to life at this point, Cosmic Invasion further adds in the tag system that obviously evokes Capcom’s crossover fighters. You don’t just pick one character in this game, you have to pick two for a classic Marvel Team-up. By picking two characters at once, you can then swap between them at any time or call your reserve member temporarily for assist attacks. 

Having two characters available at once allowed the developers to add some interesting wrinkles to the game design. Every character plays differently from another – a character like Spider-Man focuses on agile dodges and debuffing enemies with webs while someone like Venom moves more slowly, relies on grapples, and must block or parry to defend himself. Virtually every level in the game takes advantage of these differences by throwing different scenarios and enemies at you that favor one type of character over the other. Spider-Man can easily dodge behind enemies with shields, while someone like Nova can fly in the air to easily avoid obstacles. By mixing and matching characters, you can build the perfect tag-team to handle any situation. 

That’s how the developers probably want you to play, anyway. I’m too stubborn of a Spider-Man fanboy for that, so when I pick Spider-Man (or Chasm depending on how edgy I’m feeling on any given day), I’m sticking to him as long as possible. As a result, I got far more use out of the assist mechanic. 

Assists work almost exactly like Marvel Vs. Capcom in that you can send your partner out to do a helpful attack, but at the same time you’re putting them at risk of getting hit too. This system balances what would otherwise be a very overpowered mechanic, as it’s easy to call an assist to quickly subdue hordes or pile damage onto bosses. I like the balance; it forces you to pick the safest possible opening and it feels nice to deal a bunch of damage at once. 

Aside from that, if you’ve played Shredder’s Revenge you’ll find their take on the beat-em-up formula hasn’t changed all that much. Cosmic Invasion focuses on taking out hordes of enemies with a stronger focus on direct defensive mechanics rather than exploiting throws or invincibility windows. The Campaign mode takes you across stages that give you a fairly comprehensive taste of breadth of the Marvel universe. Almost every level introduces a small gimmick to differentiate itself, like bottomless pits, hazardous enemies to dodge, or objects in the environment you can aim to cause some damage. 

As a rollercoaster ride through the Marvel universe the variety makes for an awesome time, but not all of the gimmicks work for me. The game can already get pretty hectic, and some of the gimmicks, like falling meteors or flying drones, further clutter the screen to the point of being a bit too chaotic to reasonably juggle. In general, I liked some stages far more than others, and that extended to the bosses. My least favorite fights in Shredder’s Revenge were the ones that had incredibly long periods of invincibility while they forced you through different attack patterns, and Cosmic Invasion indulges in a few of those as well. 

Luckily, that’s not too big of a problem thanks to Arcade mode. Arcade mode not only addresses my problem with the parts of the game I like less than others, it addresses virtually every major problem I had with Shredder’s Revenge. I’d sum up my grievances in three major points: (1) the game was way too long for a casual run; (2) it was outrageously easy even on hard mode; and (3) the dodge, super attacks, and taunt were extremely exploitable to the point you didn't have to engage much with the actual fighting.

Arcade mode wisely splits the game up. Rather than forcing you through every stage in the game, Arcade mode instead offers you branching paths at certain points in the story. This solution basically gives you the best of all possible worlds: you get to avoid stages you don’t want to play and the developers could make a game on par with the scope of Shredder’s Revenge without compromising your ability to pick it up and play through it in about an hour. After beating the story mode once, Arcade mode has been my go-to for the rest of my playtime and I expect it to be how I enjoy the game for years to come. 

However, split paths aren’t the only reason to revisit the game through the Arcade mode. You can customize the game in a variety of ways, like selecting one of three difficulties, changing the amount of enemies that spawn, or activating unlockable modifiers. The highlights of the modifiers to me are making the super attacks cost health, faster enemies, and the vampire setting which drains your HP and only restores it if you defeat enemies. All of these options allow you to make the game as easy or hard as you want. I tried a buffet of these customizations in co-op and it was total chaos. 

Perhaps my biggest surprise, however, was that I didn’t need to turn all of these things on to have a good time. Cosmic Invasion actually poses a decent challenge even on the base Hard mode.The defensive mechanics aren’t get-out-of-jail free cards, with many requiring an understanding of each boss’s attack pattern to use efficiently. While the super power attacks are powerful and tend to refill quickly, the game throws enough at you that the game actually feels balanced for you to use them rather than just a cheat. I’ve been having a great time learning all the intricacies of the game, even if some bosses like Phylla-Vel seem disproportionately difficult compared to other parts of the game. Unfortunately,  I’m still working on my 1CC for Hard mode, so I can’t claim my gamer cred in time for this review.

I acknowledge that most people aren’t insane like me though, and will instead opt to play the game online with friends. No worries –  I pretended to be a normal person as part of this review and played online as well. To really put the game through its paces, I played it online with my Steam Deck on WiFi. I didn’t notice any problems, but my co-op partner noticed some lag and desyncing when he wasn’t the host. I suspect your mileage will vary based on connection quality, who is hosting, and other random circumstances.

Overall, I’m happy with the game even if I noticed a few bugs here and there. I’m hoping this paragraph will be outdated shortly after I write it, but here are the notable ones for your enjoyment. When I was playing online, we got stuck on one screen on two separate playthroughs until I killed myself by jumping into a bottomless pit. While that’s not ideal, the bug that actually bothered me more was how the costume swapping seemed to be broken in the build I played when you die in Arcade mode. The character box doesn’t seem to properly display what costume you’re selecting, so it’s pretty confusing and disappointing to pick the wrong costume between deaths. I suppose that’s just my punishment for dying.