Marvel Rivals, the hero shooter with actual heroes, made waves after a surprise reveal in March showed off an unusual third-person approach to the genre—and that nice, expensive license sure didn’t hurt either. Whether you want a change from Overwatch or you just want to play as Iron Man disintegrating Loki, you may be able to get your hands on Marvel Rivals sooner than you think.
With games like Valorant, Apex Legends, Overwatch, and (arguably) Rainbow Six Siege to compete against in the hero shooter space, Marvel Rivals is going to have to rely on the strength of gameplay and that aforementioned billion-dollar IP to stand out from the crowd. Whether or not they’ll succeed is anyone’s guess, but the upcoming alpha test should serve as a strong indicator of which way the game is trending.
Naturally, you’ll get to find out for yourself soon. Marvel Rivals developer NetEase recently announced that it’s opening up closed alpha testing, which sounds like an oxymoron but is, in fact, an accurate descriptor of what’s happening. 30,000 players who signed up via an application form (which you can still fill out before the start date!) will be selected to try out an alpha build of Marvel Rivals in a playtest running from May 10th to May 20th, so get those forms in while you can.
According to NetEase, the playtest will include 19 playable characters, consisting of both heroes and villains from across the Marvel universe:
- Black Panther
- Doctor Strange
- Groot
- Hela
- Hulk
- Iron Man
- Loki
- Luna Snow
- Magik
- Magneto
- Mantis
- Namor
- Peni Parker
- Punisher
- Rocket Raccoon
- Star-Lord
- Storm
- Scarlet Witch
- Spider-Man (voiced by Yuri Lowenthal of Marvel’s Spider-Man fame)
There are big names and far more obscure deep cuts on display here—I’m not sure anyone outside your local comic book store knows who Magik is, for instance. It’s unknown how much of the final roster this partial list represents, but with such a wide spread, it’s unlikely you’ll be bored over those ten days. NetEase has stated its commitment to making each hero feel different, even taking a swipe at Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League by stating it’s “not about to have the Hulk lugging around a rifle, Black Panther toting a shotgun, or Iron Man scrapping it out solely on the ground.”
Recommended system specs were also shared, with the game weighing in at about 70 gigabytes and apparently resource-intensive enough to necessitate an RTX 2060 GPU (or equivalent). It might sound like a lot, but other games in the genre boast similar requirements.
In a few short days, we’ll see if Marvel Rivals succeeds in breaking away from the pack. The sheer ubiquity of Marvel might be just what this newcomer needs to knock Overwatch off the top of the pile, as it’s hard to imagine anything with Spider-Man in it not selling like hotcakes. A shame Dr. Strange isn’t around to let us know what the future of this game looks like.
