Avengers Alliance: Best Facebook game yet

There are a lot of games coming up, so it's time I restarted my blog to keep up. Since this is a gaming journal of sorts, I want to make sure I have all the games I've played this year covered.

First up, the Facebook game Avengers Alliance.

TLDR

(For every review of a game in my blog, I'll have a TLDR section, which stands for "Too long, didn't read." Here I'll have a very short abstract of the review.)

Avengers Alliance is the best Facebook game I've played. It has a good storyline, and it really appeals to nerdy fans of Marvel comics like me. I give it an 85/100.

Avengers Assemble!

This game, based not only on the hugely successful Avengers movie of this year, but also on most of the Marvel Universe, is pretty much a free-to-play Facebook game. It's in the same genre of "social network" games as Farmville or Cityville from Zynga. That means you can play the game solo for a while, but to really progress, you need friends. (Friends give you "social currency" in the game, which is required to progress. Without friends, said currency comes much more slowly.)

Fortunately for me, I happen to have at least one friend who is actively playing the game with me, though we didn't really plan it that way. I don't even think I ever sent him a Facebook message about the game, or even a message saying, "Yo what's up? Haven't seen you in a while. Oh by the way how are you liking the Avengers game that we're playing?" I really should, though.

Map of friend's city, where I can collect daily rewards

The good thing is that this game is better than the time I played Cityville. That game required me to keep adding more and more active friends to progress. I think I had up to five or six friends playing that game for a while, but then most of them quit after a while, and then I had to as well. Avengers Alliance is different because I can just keep going with one active friend.

I have other inactive friends that I've connected to in-game, but just the connection itself also helps me. (That's why I also got my wife to play the game a little bit. She doesn't have to keep playing, and I'll benefit from being connected to her.)

The greatest heores on Earth

I'm a big Marvel fan, so it's a lot of fun for me to hire some of my favorite heroes, level them up, and use their powers against bad guys, some of them well-known villains from the Marvel universe. Here are a few of my favorites:

Tony Stark, the man, the legend

Iron Man is one of the first heroes I get. He's also one of the "main characters" in the whole storyline, probably because he is now the most famous Marvel superhero.

Two words: OPTIC BLAST

This is Cyclops. When he does his Mega Optic Blast ability, he takes off his goggles and lets loose with all his power. Nice touch, in my opinion.

She doesn't have to be a telepath to know what I'm thinking ...

And here is Emma Frost, a.k.a. The White Queen. She's damn sexy, cold, and for some reason a good guy now, since I've always known her to be a villainess. I got her as a reward for a line of "special missions" that I played. Yeah, I'll admit that I had to pay real money to finish those missions. Hey, this game is so good I might as well pay some money for it.

Cool story bro

One thing that sets this game apart from the other social games is the storyline. It's not just fighting Marvel heroes against villains for no reason at all. Nor is the storyline a simple rehash of the Avengers movie. Instead (as far as I know) the story is completely original for the game.

Effect of The Pulse

Basically the story is that a mysterious energy pulse hits Earth and completely screws up communications, electronics, etc. Shards of a weird element called ISO-8 have also fallen from the sky, and said element can do both good and bad things to humans. Of course, this gets the Marvel villains all excited, since they want to use ISO-8 for bad things.

Who that total bad-ass? Nick Fury, ya damn right!

Nick Fury (the black Samuel L. Jackson version of the character, not the old white guy version) has invoked the Avengers Initiative. And this is where the story starts.

By the way, the game also has a database of character and story info called "Marvel XP," which does a wonderful job expanding the world depicted in the game.

Marvel XP

I choose you, Colossus!

Colossus giving poor old Bullseye a brass knuckle sandwich

That's a screenshot of Colossus, whom I call "The Big Guy," in action.

I guess it should be obvious from the screenshot that battles are turn-based and very strategic. It's a lot like Pokemon, except instead of pets, I have Marvel heroes. (Oh by the way, the guy in the upper-left corner is the "agent," i.e. the character that I myself play. Yeah, that's right, I play an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.)

Buy new weapons. Like a kid in a candy store.

My agent gets to use high-tech gadgets such as this weapon called the "P.E.W. 'Zealous'" ...

You have mutant super-strength? Big f'n deal, I has PEW PEW LAZOR!

PvE and PvP

The PvP pre-battle screen. I'm on the left, random player on the right.

There's also an element of PvP, or Player vs. Player. It's not actually real-time in that the opposing player has to be there, but if I feel like it, I can fight pre-assembled teams that belong to other players. Whoever has the best PvP teams will get higher ratings.

However, like all games that allow you to pay real money to get power-ups, truly competitive PvP isn't possible since it pretty much boils down to who spent the most amount of money. And if I did that, I wouldn't enjoy the fun of earning most of the rewards by playing the game and progressing. So yeah, PvP isn't for me.

Fortunately this game focused around PvE, or Player vs. Environment. Hence the storyline, characters, villains, missions, etc.

Bottom Line

Score screen after a victorious battle

The bottom line is that I'm still playing this game, still sinking time into it, still playing missions over and over again just to progress the storyline or get that new weapon or power-up, still hiring cool new heroes like Spider-man and Hawkeye, and still having fun.

This is probably the most successful Facebook game I've played. It even got me to spend some money on it.

By the way, if you're playing the game, send me an invite. I can always use more AA friends. ;-)

Pros:

• Engaging storyline.
• Great graphics.
• Good pacing on the progression.
• Fans of Marvel comics like me will love it.
• Don't need to bother too many friends to keep playing.

Cons:

• Battles can get a little long and drawn out due to the slow pace of status texts that pop up.

My score: 85/100