MARVEL Cosmic Invasion has been on everyone’s mind since it was revealed earlier this year. Developed by Tribute Games and published by Dotemu, this exciting four-player tag-team beat ’em up aims to be the perfect successor to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge.
After beating the game a few days ago, I’m here to tell you now that MARVEL Cosmic Invasion is simply incredible. It’s not just the perfect successor, but it’s also the undeniably best beat ’em up game of 2025. Here are more details on Tribute Games’ latest masterpiece and why you should check it out, especially if you’re a diehard Marvel fan.
An Epic Adventure Across The Galaxy
MARVEL Cosmic Invasion takes place immediately after Annihilus launches an unprecedented Annihilation Wave attack across the entire galaxy. Players step into the roles of fifteen Earth-born and cosmic marvel characters who must work together and travel across various locations to end Annihilus’ widespread reign of terror.
The full roster of playable characters includes:
- Captain America
- Iron Man
- Spider-Man
- Venom
- Wolverine
- Storm
- Phoenix
- Nova
- Phyla-Vell
- She-Hulk
- Rocket Raccoon
- Black Panther
- Beta Ray Bill
- Silver Surfer
- Cosmic Ghost Rider
Interestingly enough, the game starts with only 11 characters to choose from, and the other four are added as you progress through the campaign. There are storyline reasons for this, which will make even more sense once you start playing. Fans can also expect appearances from other Marvel characters, such as The Watcher, Thanos, and The Eater of Worlds himself, Galactus.
From a narrative standpoint, MARVEL Cosmic Invasion successfully captures the essence of both reading your favorite Marvel comic and watching a cool Saturday morning cartoon. While this is your standard adventure story about heroes uniting to save the day, the writers do a great job of making you feel the weight of Annihilus’ threat and why he must be stopped.
In addition to this, every single aspect of the presentation, down to the pixel art animation, voice acting, and music soundtrack, nails everything right about a well-made Marvel product. You can tell that Tribute Games poured their hearts and souls into crafting a love letter to Marvel that Stan Lee, fans, and all the artists who ever worked on these characters would be immensely proud to see. This is Avengers: Endgame levels of greatness, and I guarantee you’ll grin several times in happiness while playing this game.
The 2D retro-stylized character models and cutscenes between each stage look phenomenal. The way characters are represented and interact with each other shows a serious level of commitment to studying the source material. Some of the throwback animations will also remind you of other titles where these characters appeared.
I reviewed this game on my Xbox Series X console and didn’t run into any performance issues, bugs, or glitches. Fans can expect the same type of experience regardless of whether they play on PC or a PlayStation 5 console. For even more details on performance, I once again recommend checking out what Digital Foundry has to say about this title.
Fun and addictive gameplay is the core pillar of what makes MARVEL Cosmic Invasion such an absolute blast from start to finish. Players can pick and swap between two heroes at a time as they fight their way through 15 stages (not including the brief tutorial stage at the start of the game).
Each character has his or her own basic attacks, secondary throwable weapons or guns, and special signature finishing moves that can be used once their focus bar is leveled up. The tag-team feature is still the coolest aspect of all this because it’s fun trying out two different heroes to see how their varying combat styles mix and match. I strongly recommend picking one character for ground combat and another for aerial, as you’ll encounter several types of enemies in both of these scenarios.
Each stage has challenges for completing specific milestones with certain characters. These are completely optional, as you are still free to use any character that you’d like. At the end of each stage, your character earns XP, which aids their abilities even further as they get deeper into the campaign.
The campaign takes about 5-7 hours to complete and has four-player local, online co-op, and cross-play support. If you’re looking for more of a challenge, you can check out the Arcade mode option, which lets you play through the game with limited lives, continues, and no save progression. Lastly, the Vault option helps you keep track of your Team level, corps files on all the characters in the game, and a cosmic matrix where cosmic cubes you acquire can be used to unlock more data and rewards.
If there’s only one critique to be made about MARVEL Cosmic Invasion, it would be that there are even more favorite characters that could have been added to the game. The good news is that there is a strong possibility we will get more games in the future, depending on whether this game sells well. Considering that it only costs $29.99, I don’t believe this will be a problem, but only time will tell.
Final Verdict
To summarize, is MARVEL Cosmic Invasion worth your time and money? 1000% Yes. If you love beat ’em up games and MARVEL, then there is no better experience than what you’ll get here. Tribute Games knocks it out of the ballpark once again, and I can’t wait for their Scott Pilgrim EX game dropping next year.
MARVEL Cosmic Invasion is out today for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. Let us know if you plan to check out the game in the comments below.
This review was based on a review copy of MARVEL Cosmic Invasion for the Xbox Series X provided by Dotemu and Tribute Games.
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