Marvel Cosmic Invasion | Review

Nick "Shpeshal Nick" Baker 3 weeks agoLast Updated: December 1, 2025

0 2,732 9 minutes read

The last time we got a Marvel ensemble based scrolling beat ’em up was all the way back in 1991 with Data East’s Captain America and the Avengers. Unless of course you want to count the 1992 X-Men Arcade game. But you know what? Either way it’s been a hell of a long time. Given the renaissance the genre has been going through the last five years or so, it’s actually surprising this didn’t happen sooner. Maybe Marvel couldn’t find the right partner?

Luckily, Tribute Games absolutely wowed us with the incredible Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge back in 2022 so it’s safe to say, the right partner came along. Can Marvel Cosmic Invasion live up to the incredibly high bar set by Shredder’s Revenge?

Many of you will remember my excitement when this game was announced, which became somehwat muted after playing the recent Steam demo. But I wanted to be sure the issues weren’t just isolated to the demo or the place I was playing them. The demo had some pretty genuine issues that had me concerned as a big scrolling beat ’em up fan.

Let’s see if my fears have been allayed with the full version of the game.

Bug Attack!

Any Marvel fan will know that the Marvel universe is full of “big bads”. Key antagonists that play their role in propelling any comic book or movie story forward. This also applies to the video games. In Cosmic Invasion that’s Annihilus, who honestly before this game I actually hadn’t heard of. He’s supposed to be primarily a Fantastic 4 big bad but makes his appearance in Cosmic Invasion, trying to take over the world with his band of bug based henchmen.

He’s using slimy little critters that seep into your brain and take control of you to take over various Marvel Hero nemeses to fulfil his various plots as part of a bigger overarching plan to take over the world and universe. So basically, he doesn’t really care who he pisses off.

It’s up to you and the Marvel Superheroes you (or 3 of your co-op buddies) choose to defeat Annihilus’ army and foil his evil scheme! Or something like that.

A well worn path in new shoes

Those of you who have played Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Shredder’s Revenge should feel right at home. Cosmic Invasion has a super familiar style and vibe to Shredder’s Revenge but with a shiny new Marvel sheen.

But structurally it’s all very similar. You have your Campaign mode where you’ll play through the main story selecting your characters making your way through the main path that has extremely slight branches that all ultimately need to be completed in order to progress. You have the Arcade mode which is your more classic experience from the days of coin eating yore where your lives and continues are limited and there’s no save progression. Once you’re done you’re done. In other words, the one for the purists.

But something new and really cool to Cosmic Invasion is the Vault. Understandably, comic book fans love their lore and their universes and Marvel obviously has a much richer universe than the Ninja Turtles so the Vault’s inclusion makes a tonne of sense and is a neat little extra.

Essentially, playing through campaign levels earns you cosmic cubes. You insert these cosmic cubes into the Cosmic Matrix which earns various extras like Arcade Mode modifiers, Music Tracks to listen to, different Hero colour palettes and Nova Corp Files. What are Nova Corp files? They’re basically just bios for each character as you unlock them and a place to listen to your various unlocked music tracks.

The last part of the Vault is the Hero Lab, which is a place for you to check on the upgrade progress of your unlocked characters as well as checking their moveset. Because yes, in a relatively rarely used feature of scrolling beat ’em ups, your characters in Marvel Cosmic Invasion can be upgraded. Whether that be an HP or Focus upgrade or a new passive skill or colour palette. It’s a neat carrot that encourages multiple playthroughs with multiple characters.

Maxing out your Vault, isn’t as arduous as it may sound to some and given you can jump in and out of stages and complete them individually, doing it piecemeal works too.

Marvel vs….Marvel

Now…let’s get to why we’re really here. How does it play? What new does it do? Have the demo concerns been addressed? Is it even any good?! Let’s try and take this from the top.

In Marvel Cosmic Invasion, Tribute games has really gone out of their way to do a lot different in the genre. They showed with Shredder’s Revenge that they had perfected the old school beat ’em up formula and with Cosmic Invasion have obviously decided that they wanted everyone to know they can innovate and do their own thing too.

The biggest and most immediately obvious change is the tag system. While tagging in a scrolling beat ’em up isn’t technically new – it was first done in Double Dragon Gaiden: Rise of the Dragons, it’s implementation here gives the entire combat system a very Marvel vs Capcom 2D fighter feel. Which seems obvious was the intention. While you need to build a meter in Double Dragon to allow your partner to be tagged in, in Cosmic Invasion you can tag in your team mate at any time and as often as you like. Much like the 2D fighters, you can tag to swap or tag to assist in the fight. I will say the assist tagging needs a little bit of tweaking as it didn’t seem to work very consistently for me at all. The swap out and basic assist works fine, but there’s an assist tag that requires a direction be held while you tag and I just found that to be wildly inconsistent in application and I could rarely pull it off intentionally.

But overall the tag combat works well and can help deal with crowd control, in particular with the other relatively big shift for this genre, aerial combat. Again, aerial combat isn’t new to the genre, but it’s a real focus here. There’s a lot of enemies who can fly and suitably you have many heroes to pick from who can also fly. Be it Iron Man, Nova, Storm, there’s no shortage of options to choose from. But where I bemoaned the focus on aerial enemy combat in the demo, having played through the prologue/tutorial and learned more of the controls and movesets, you have plenty at your disposal to be able to deal with this focus on aerial threats. Even ground based characters will generally have a specific aerial attack, often executed with a combination of A and X which will unleach an upward attack to allow the heroes who can’t fly to still deal with flying enemies. Which is important given that given you have two characters to use, one could die, leaving the other to go it alone for the remainder of the level.

Other rarely used combat options in scrolling beat ’em ups are blocking and parrying. Cosmic Invasion uses a mix of blocks, parries and dodges. By that I mean some heroes block and parry, while others dodge. This can be discombobulating for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there’s no real set structure for who blocks or dodges. For example, Nova is a flight character but blocks, but then so does Captain America who is a ground character. But then Spider man is a “flight” character who dodges. Wolverine dodges too despite being a ground character. This just means you have to always be mindful and remember who does what. I think it would have been easier on the player to just have a set of rules. Flight characters block, ground characters dodge. Or something like that to just make it a little simpler. What makes it worse? Is that neither actually works in a reliable and consistent way.

Secondly, to further exacerbate the blocking, parrying and dodging issues, there’s no grabbing! Which is something that I find absolutely befuddling to be missing from a scrolling beat ’em up and I can’t quite figure out the reasoning behind it. It’s a staple of scrolling beat ’em up crowd control combat options but would also help immensely in negating the aforementioned blocking, parry and dodging issues. I really hope it’s something that’s implementable post launch because I feel like it would help with the combat a lot. The game can often swarm you with a variety of enemy types, many of which will be projectile based and having an inconcistent dodge, parry and block with no option to grab an enemy to throw into a crowd of other enemies is a perplexing decision.

Aside from these issues, the more basic combat is solid. Luckily, the issues I had in the demo aren’t present here. Hits land with some force that you can feel far better than you could in the demo (at least for me) and your power attacks works well in tandem with your Specials to help with bigger crowds and boss battles. Your power attack works similarly to your specials in Streets of Rage II but instead of costing you health meter, your Power Attacks are limited in number and work on a cool down timer. The Special attack has a meter tied to it which is built through attacking enemies or finding Special Power ups in the stage. Like Marvel vs Capcom, you can have both of your characters combine to unleash their supers at once which can bring absolute chaos of the best kind to the screen depending on your character combo. The awesome juggling mechanics from Shredder’s Revenge make their way over in tact and work beautifully. I loved being able to catch a dead enemy in the right spot to just keep juggling them….forever. Got an achievement for a massive combo? No sweat…

Overall it feels like Tribute tried to bite off a little more than they could chew in trying to bring so many differentiating factors into the combat balance of the game that it somewhat suffers for it a little? I think a narrowing down on nailing either the tag combat or the aerial combat focus might have helped here. Because the slight failing of one, is exacerbated by the other. I still think all my quibbles with the combat should all be fixable and if they can do so, would elevate this game to the same tier as Shredder’s Revenge and Streets of Rage 4.

Marvel’s authentic self

Much like Shredder’s Revenge though, Tribute Games has paid the utmost respect to the Marvel IP all within the confines of their now signature style. Everything looks and feels like Tribute took painstaking care to ensure this was a game that looks like something Marvel made themselves.

Character sprites have struck a perfect balance between being unique to this game while evoking the look and animation of their Marvel vs Capcom counterparts, which when combined with the tag team on screen action, makes for some fantastic moments when the game is at it’s most chaotic.

Spider-man is suitably quippy, Wolverine retains his gruff angry nature and Iron Man is well…Iron Man. While I’m not enough of a comic book aficionado to truly confirm the veracity of Tribute’s faithfulness to the print variant of these beloved characters, I’m not sure it would affect one’s ability to enjoy this game either way. I was happy with what I experienced from that standpoint.

While the visual style and combat is trying to evoke the look and feel of Marvel vs Capcom, I can’t lie I would have loooooved it if the soundtrack did the same. The score leans towards your more typical or expected superhero type of soundtrack. Very grand and if you’ve ever played superhero games before (particularly Marvel ones), you’ll know exactly what I mean. It’s all fairly safe and I can’t help but feel like following through on trying to be different all the way to the soundtrack would have really helped this game leave an imprint like Marvel vs Capcom 2 did over 20 years ago.

Go crazy if you want

While I don’t quite feel like Marvel Cosmic Invasion hits the dizzying heights achieved by Shredder’s Revenge and Streets of Rage 4, this is still an excellent chapter in the recent renassiance of the scrolling beat ’em up genre and well worth your time whether you’re a Marvel fan or a scrolling beat ’em up fan. But obviously a must buy if you’re both…like me!

Local and online drop-in/drop-out 4 player co-op is a very welcome addition and the unlockable extras as well as the upgrade system will definitely keep you coming back long beyond rolling credits.

My biggest hope is that Tribute Games can implement some of the combat tweaks I mentioned earlier to really take this title to the upper echelon of games in the genre because as good as it is, it doesn’t quite stand toe to toe with the greats, but it’s agonisingly close.