Highlights

  • Marvel Rivals prioritizes depth and authenticity, ensuring each character is more than just a brand icon.
  • The game innovatively includes Bruce Banner as a playable phase, adding layers to the Hulk character.
  • Banner's transformation mechanic sets a new standard, allowing players to strategically control their gameplay.

Marvel Rivals’ closed alpha period has concluded and as the next batch of lucky players anticipate a closed beta period there’s quite a bit to dissect. Marvel Rivals is clearly leaning toward an esports scene and how its metas and skill ceilings evolve will be intriguing in that regard, but casual gameplay is accentuated by how intimately each character’s abilities delve into their lore and source material. This way, no Marvel Rivals character is a superficial shell banking on their brand iconography to make them interesting or endearing and that’s a blessing all on its own.

As more characters are added to Marvel Rivals’ roster after launch it’ll be exciting to see how comprehensive they are as well. As for its launch roster, Marvel Rivals hasn’t shirked its great responsibility to represent each character with as much authenticity as possible; Marvel Rivals’ Spider-Man is a complete character with web-swinging, wall-crawling, spider-sense, spider tracers, and more at his disposal, for instance. Hulk is no different and, while Marvel Rivals’ Hulk is being compared closely to Overwatch’s Winston and D.Va, it’s fantastic to see his puny alter ego receiving the limelight he deserves.

w (1)-8
Related
Marvel Rivals Has a Genius Adaptation of a Classic Spider-Man Superpower

Marvel Rivals clearly put a ton of detail and passion into its portrayal of each iconic character and Spider-Man's adaptation is no different.

Marvel Rivals Rightfully Puts Bruce Banner Front and Center Over Hulk

Bruce Banner not only being represented in Marvel Rivals but also playing a vital role as an initial playable phase of the Hulk’s character is astounding and unprecedented. Banner is even featured prominently in the character’s portrait and has his own skins, ensuring that he isn’t ever an oversight or underappreciated.

Beginning a match as Banner and needing to activate his Ultimate to become the Hulk is refreshingly clever, and being able to run around, shoot a gamma ray gun, or lob gamma grenades at opponents is more gameplay for Banner than anyone might’ve anticipated.

Of course, the actual hulking brute is who’s more exciting on paper, not the moody physicist and gamma radiation specialist, regardless of whether he’s a shade of grey or green. Hulk also could’ve been the easiest character to dismiss as a banal tank—or vanguard—in Marvel Rivals. Instead, Marvel Rivals brilliantly chose to represent Hulk as wholly as possible by allowing Banner to have an equal role on the battlefield and even electing to depict a temporary Monster Hulk transformation.

Banner is infinitely more exceptional when his Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde dichotomy is illustrated and that same dynamic is punctuated beautifully in Marvel Rivals. One of the neatest choices made for the character is how death at any transformation stage regresses him back to a previous stage, meaning that if players are killed as Hero Hulk they simply turn back into Banner again.

Therefore, the longer players can stay transformed or reach Banner’s Monster Hulk phase the longer they can stay on the battlefield. It’s terrific that players aren’t out of luck when they’re stuck with Banner, even if he is much less effective or valuable and especially because a lesser game might’ve only featured him in an introductory cutscene where he transforms into the Hulk rather than find a way to include Banner in competitive 6v6 gameplay.

These transformations are fundamental for the character and are further evidence of how attentive Marvel Rivals is with its adaptations because it certainly hasn’t taken the easy or obvious way out with any of them thus far and that has made gameplay far richer, too. This is probably the most exposure Banner has received in a Marvel game other than maybe Marvel’s Avengers, where Banner was played by Troy Baker, and it’s great that he’s a crucial basis for Hulk’s character transformations in Marvel Rivals.