Play Marvel Avengers Alliance Tactics Game

Play a new Marvel Avengers Alliance 2 Game

Take on the role of SHIELD Commander and lead a team of Marvel super heroes and S.H.I.E.L.D. agents against a mysterious threat known as Incursions.

Fights are turn-based, with 4 player characters vs. 2 – 7 AI controlled enemies. PVP is asynchronous, pitting up to 4 player heroes against 4 AI-controlled enemy player heroes. Completing story Assignments earns in-game currency, which is spent on new heroes and upgrades to the home base.

M:AA Tactics (also called “MarTac”) launched worldwide on June 2nd, 2014. The game is available on Facebook and was developed by Playdom, the same studio that released Marvel Avengers Alliance in 2012 but is maintained by a separate team and runs in parallel to MAA.

Marvel Avengers Alliance Tactics: A Brief Review

I’ve been playing this game for almost 3 weeks now. Obviously, I like it a lot since I made this site, but if you’d like to know more about the game itself and what I think read on.

About the game itself: Marvel Avengers Alliance Tactics is the sequel to Marvel Avengers Alliance (launched 2012). It’s like an RTS meets tactical RPG. This time around, you play as a Commander in charge of a squadron of super heroes located in the Savage Land. Last time it was “The Pulse”. This time it’s “Incursions”. And all the bad guys in the Marvel universe are coming here for a piece of the pie. Your goal is the same: fight off the bad guys and level up your heroes.

Your Role: This time you play as an invisible Commander barking orders at heroes. I like this because it’s more focused on the heroes from the Marvel universe. Combat is turn-based, so you just tell heroes where to go and what to do when their turn comes up. Nick Fury talks to you like you’re someone important, so that’s fun too.

Agents: Instead of playing with 1 agent, now you get a whole bunch of nearly useless SHIELD Agents in the game. They suck big time. They die in one hit, can only move a few tiles in a turn, and just generally take up space. There is not one thing they do better than heroes and they cost the same to train so I just ignore them and focus on getting more CP and SHIELD points for my heroes. I guess they might be good for Flight Deck missions, but there’s not enough of them to defend your base AND sit on the Flight Deck. (Plus, the Flight Deck doesn’t pay well. If you need Silver then go attack a few player bases and you will have plenty.)

Command Base: A lot of the familiar stuff from MAA, like hero training and flight deck, are embedded in your home base’s eight buildings. You’ll have to pay to upgrade the buildings if you want access to things like more flight deck jets and higher hero training levels and more space for Silver and Refined Iso-8, but so far the upgrades are affordable and not too time consuming to complete. If I have any complaint about the base it’s that I wish the buildings could be customized since everyone looks exactly the same on the map.

Some buildings are useless, like the Barracks. I haven’t even built one yet three weeks into the game, but that’s probably something that will change as the game gets updated and goes live.

More PVP (for better or for worse):This game is much more PVP-centric than Marvel Avengers Alliance was. Instead of being cordoned off into a separate game mode, PVP is integrated into the World Map. As you look for story targets, you will also find lots of potential player targets. Everyone you fight is AI-controlled, including heroes owned by other players. The thing I like about PVP are the crazy payouts: whenever I’m short on silver I just look for a high level target and flatten his base. There’s no level restrictions on who you can attack (which is probably going to change, as can’t say I’ve seen too many games that let a level 5 attack a level 30 and win) and the Silver/RISO payouts are massive. Even better, most people aren’t defending their bases that well so it’s easy to just steamroll everyone.

No word on tournaments or a ranking system yet but MAA didn’t launch with these, either.

The thing I do not like about PVP is that it’s really hard to get your own base properly defended. You have 8 buildings to defend, and each of those 8 buildings needs its own team of 4 heroes guarding it. Holy crap that’s a lot of heroes. Even after 3 weeks I only have five heroes. Meanwhile, the guy attacking you comes in with his rockstar A-Team and you’re lucky to have one good team in one building to fight him with. PVP is really unfairly balanced in favor of the attacker. As evidence, I’ve never lost an offensive PVP fight in this game. Even when the enemy building has a hero guarding it, it’s just one vs. my four. Too easy.

Custom hero builds: The trend in MAA was to keep adding more and more abilities to heroes, well beyond the original 4. It’s back big time in Marvel Avengers Alliance Tactics. Remember when they added Punisher and he could be EVERY class? Well, every character in the game is like that now - sort of. Every hero has 4 attacks, a passive, and a guard ability. And there’s like, a half dozen things you can buy to put in those slots, and there’s a new version available every level.

Frankly, I am overwhelmed. I can’t tell which ones are good and which ones are a waste of time, and they’re too expensive to just experiment with. I like the idea of customizing the characters but I think sooner or later I’ll be writing a strategy guide for which build is best (because there WILL be an optimal build) for each hero.

Oh, and ISO-8 chips are back (you know, those colorful rocks you can permanently stick on uniforms to boost stats). You can buy ISO-8 chips from the ISO-8 Workshop building (no store???) or win them in prize roulettes, just like MAA.

Spec Ops: There’s a tab for Spec Ops in the Assignments menu, so it’s safe to say Spec Ops will be making a comeback in this game. Playdom hasn’t said a word about this game yet though so of course, there’s no way of knowing when it will launch or what hero it will feature.

Bugs: Yeah, there’s a bunch of bugs. Playdom posts “Known Issues” with patch notes on the official Playdom forums.

It’s still a good time to play, though.You learn the game before everyone else and get all the sweet loot before it gets nerfed and removed from teh game. Remember all the sweet advantages the guys who played from MAA’s launch had? CP farming off bosses, Heavy Ion Beams, Signpost, cheap LE weapons – that stuff will happen again, so start early and play often. Marvel Avengers Alliance Tactics is going to be huge this summer and you can get in on the ground level by reading the guides on this site.