That this beat 'em up has a roster of 15 different playable Marvel superheroes is immediately impressive. But what's really amazing is every single one of them feels completely distinct, fun to play, and truly super.

I just wish Marvel Cosmic Invasion offered more for them all to do.

In the vein of developer Tribute Games' last game, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge, this is an unabashedly old school side-scroller. Bad guys appear, you punch them until they're all gone, then you move a bit further right and more bad guys appear. Repeat until you reach a boss fight. Simple, nostalgic, satisfying.

But as in Shredder's Revenge, more modern ideas enhance the action. Blocks, parries, and dodges make it easier to stay on your feet than in the old classics, for example, and generous launchers and timing windows allow you to string together combos and juggle foes in the air without hours of practice. It's all the joy of the arcade without the frustration.

Layered onto that fun and accessible foundation are the characters themselves, who each boast their own simple but empowering arsenal of attacks and abilities. What makes them so exciting to play is how much Tribute Games leans into their superpowers, rather than trying to compress such larger-than-life characters down into simple beat-'em-up archetypes.

Of course Iron Man can fly at will and shoot lasers out of his hands—he's Iron Man! Just like Wolverine can leap across half the screen to rip a Sentinel to pieces, and Phoenix can grab and throttle enemies with her mind. Everyone gets to be as overpowered as they should be, and it's a blast.

And, importantly, that means they all have distinctly different playstyles. As Captain America, you're solid and stoic, controlling the flow of the fight by stunning enemies with shield throws and parrying their projectiles as you advance to give them a beatdown. As Rocket Raccoon, you're the opposite—scampering wildly around the screen, dodging past enemies, hurling randomised grenades, and jetpacking up into the sky before dive-bombing down to bounce repeatedly on enemy heads.

Double time

Much of the joy of the game is in trying out all the different characters and learning to master their toolsets—and it's here that Cosmic Invasion's cleverest idea comes into play. In both solo and co-op each player chooses not just one character but two, able to tag between them at will.

There's a tactical element to it. Heroes can tag out to escape an enemy grapple, or to recover some health when they're in danger. Certain heroes are better at handling particular enemy types than others, and tag-team attacks allow you to combine their abilities to a limited degree during combos.

But really the important thing is just that it lets you play with more of your toys at once. Not only does it allow you to explore the roster twice as quickly, but it also takes some of the pressure off trying out a new character—if you're struggling to get to grips with them, you can always pair them with someone more familiar and switch between as needed. It really lets the game's best quality—its cast—shine.

At first, when I started playing the game's campaign, that felt like it was going to be enough. An amazing roster with lots of attractive screens to walk across and plenty of colourful enemies to bash—sorted. But unfortunately it's not long before some cracks start to show.

Eight levels in—about halfway—the difficulty suddenly spikes with a series of brutal boss fights. It forced me to really learn my heroes' capabilities and master the rhythm of combat, rather than button-bashing, which was welcome. But it's a jarring shift from the very casual feel of earlier levels.

The real problem, though, comes after that, when in the last third the difficulty simply crashes back down again. As the galaxy-spanning story of alien invasion reaches its height, and you run into some of Marvel's most powerful and exciting villains, things get strangely easier and less engaging—culminating in an incredibly underwhelming final boss.

In Shredder's Revenge, there was a wonderful sense of escalation over the course of the campaign—both in narrative and difficulty. As the turtles travelled from the streets of New York to fantastical and alien destinations, they encountered stranger and more dangerous enemies and boss fights became more creative and elaborate spectacles.

There's none of that here. Instead, Marvel Cosmic Invasion limps to the finish line, and then it's over. In a campaign that's only about three hours max in the first place, that's roughly an hour of gentle, fun introduction, an hour of beating you over the head until you've mastered it, and then an hour of anti-climax. And… well, that's pretty much it.

That wonderful roster ensures that even at its weakest, the campaign is always still fun. But ending on a low only emphasises how brief it is, and there's precious little else to do.

Rinse and repeat

The arcade mode invites you to see if you can do a full run in one go with limited lives, and there is more to it than just a barebones re-run of the campaign. There are different difficulty levels and a healthy list of options to tweak, and cleverly it allows you to choose which of two stages you want to play at various points, trimming down the time commitment of beating the game in one session. But ultimately you are just playing the same core content again, with nothing to really incentivise you outside of some very minor progression elements.

Arcade oldheads may roll their eyes at the suggestion that that's not enough—it's certainly true to the genre's roots. But in 2025 it does feel like a paltry offering, and it seems to me like it wouldn't take that much creative remixing to squeeze in a lot more fun.

Use the same enemies and assets to throw together a randomised survival mode, like we saw in Shredder's Revenge's DLC, or add new challenges and collectibles to the levels after beating the campaign to encourage replays. Make alt versions of levels that change up the enemy layouts, or introduce weird new modifiers to play around. Anything to make it feel like a bit more than simply doing the exact same thing over and over with very little left to master.

It sucks to say, because I still love playing these characters. And I love being in Tribute Games' version of the Marvel universe, with its bright, expressive animations, brilliantly dramatic soundtrack, and variety of different iconic locations. But I've done everything there is to do already, and while I'd love to be eagerly planning my next tag-team combo, instead I'm just hoping for some updates or DLC to draw me back in.

When it comes to traditional, nostalgic beat-'em-up action, Tribute Games is still the best studio doing it right now, and by the standards of the arcade classics Marvel Cosmic Invasion is aping, it's seriously impressive. But coming so soon after the same publisher put out Absolum—a fantastic brawler that reframes the genre through an expansive roguelike lense—it's hard not to feel it's just that little bit too stuck in the past for its own good.