Forgotten Phone App Games- Marvel Avengers- Alliance

 By Mark Rodriguez

One of the games that I invested a lot of time in was Marvel Alliance. Fresh of the Avengers movies, you get to play as a rookie SHIELD agent and get to fight alongside the likes of Captain America and Iron Man as you face HYDRA agents and Marvel super villains. Even though the game was called Avengers Alliance, it included most of the Marvel Universe in there. I first encountered this game as an online Facebook game, but I also found it as a phone app game.

You can customize your SHIELD agent, and while you start the game alone, soon enough Iron Man, Hawkeye and Black Widow join your team. As the game advances you can recruit new characters based on how many gold bars you earn, which you can get every time you level up. 

The game is basically an RPG. You can upgrade your armor and weapons for yourself as you level up or earn more gold and SHIELD points. The superhero characters level up and unlock new attacks. Whenever they gain enough hp, you send them off to train. Once the training is complete, they level up.

The character come in certain types, ranging from Infiltrators like the Black Widow and the Black Cat, Tacticians like Cyclops and Hawkeye and Bruisers like Colossus and She-Hulk. Despite having the Marvel Super Heroes on your side, your agent is still the most important member of the team. One of the main reasons is you're the only one with access to extra items during a fight. Yes, during fights you can use your inventory with things like heal potions, first aid kits, grenades, and other stuff you can use to attack the bad guys or keep your team alive. 

Every member of the team can use the items, but if the agent dies, the inventory goes with him, and the surviving team mates will be left without a way to replenish health or anything else for the rest of the battle.

The game sets you on several missions, (Nick Fury and Maria Hill brief you on your missions) and each mission has several areas you can go to fight off the henchmen and mid-bosses before the boss appears. Some places ask you to deploy one of your heroes, and they basically sit out a few fights until their mission is done and you gain extra points and chances to win rare items. Depending on the missions, they might ask you either deploy whoever you want from your team based on their character type, or a specific character that you might or might not have on your roster. Certain battles or stories even have certain characters team up with you, even if you haven't unlocked them yourself. For example, Thor joins you on your fight against Loki, and Spider-Man joins you in the fight against the Vulture. Several of the bosses you'll face include characters like Baron Zemo, Bull's Eye and Doctor Doom.

Not all missions are available from the start. Naturally they follow a story, so you can't go to chapter 2 until you're done with chapter 1.. but others are considered 'Premium Chapters' which require you to do certain tasks to unlock them (or you can buy them with enough gold). Sometimes there are Special Ops missions that appear and are only available for a set amount of days in real time. If you're able to beat these missions in time you gain rare items and might be able to recruit rare characters. The most recent mission I was in had a random 'Group Boss', the Red Skull. You have to fight him several times, and your online friends also have a chance to fight him. It was a random event and he kept appearing in certain parts of the main story.

Speaking of online friends, since it's a Facebook game, you can invite other friends to join the game, even though technically you don't play side by side with them. As they go on their missions and level up, you go to their progress and earn some silver and points for yourself. You can also send gifts to each other as well. There's also a 'distress call' you can use that summons on of your friend's agents to jump in for a quick attack. This is awesome, especially since your friend might be a higher level than you and be using more powerful weapons. One difference between the Facebook version and the iphone version, was the Facebook version would show the user name of the assist character. It was always cool seeing 'Johnny' or 'Moore' hop in for a quick assist.

There's also tournaments you can enter that are available for limited times. Winning these allow you to unlock even more hidden characters to add to your team or rare items. This is your chance to show off just how powerful you and your teammates are as you face off against other players all over Facebook!

My Opinions-

The game is fun and is always good for a quick match during a lunch break. The game even lets you ship off your heroes on missions in plane for up to 24 hours real time, so they're earning more silver for you while you're on your day-to-day. However, like a lot of phone app games, you can only get so far before you have to pay to continue. Running out of energy stops from you from continuing any other battles unless you wait for it to recharge or buy more energy. You can use your hard-earned cash to buy more gold and Avengers points to buy more characters or weapons, and unlock the premium chapters.

It was a very popular game in its day, and since the MCU was still in its prime, the game focused a lot on the characters featured in the films, such as Whiplash, The Destroyer, Red Skull using the Tesseract, which was a big part of the earlier movies and so forth. There would eventually be an Avengers Alliance 2, but I never got to play it since I felt I needed to get further into the story mode of the first game. Both games would eventually get de-listed on September 1, 2016. 

One of the most interesting things about when I first reviewed this game back on August 5, 2014, was that the actual game developers comments on the original article. That's pretty cool. And yes, I know, I didn't get back to them til almost a year later but that one slipped right from under me.