Marvel Cosmic Invasion (Review)

Marvel Cosmic Invasion
Platform: All Current Platforms
Released December 1, 2025
Directed by Fred Gemus
Developed by Dotemu
Published by Tribute Games
$29.99 Hulk-Smashed baddies in the making of this review.
This review was played on a Nintendo Switch 2.

SOME SMALL ROSTER/BOSS SPOILERS AHEAD

Yeah, don’t sweat it. You’ll get lost in the fog of war playing this. I must have attacked my own teammates once or twice every stage. And that’s to say nothing of how many times I walked off the goddamn Bifröst.

Yep, this unofficial sequel to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge is everything you want in a Marvel brawler. Old school fisticuffs with new school sensibilities. The fifteen starting characters (you know DLC is coming) all feel completely different from each-other and have unique fighting styles and move sets. HUGE move sets. It could take you a while just to get the hang of one character, let alone fifteen. But even if you have no gaming skill at all, it’s okay. This game’s a cinch for everyone! During a recent get together I threw on Marvel Cosmic Invasion, handed out four controllers, and mostly just watched. I wanted everyone to get a turn, and the sheer joy that everyone had was something to behold. There were a lot of kids and their parents, and what made it cool was the parents recognized the gameplay from their own childhood while their kids were hyped because Marvel is scorching hot right now. Frankly, this feels like a better use of the genre than Ninja Turtles because there’s just so many superheroes to choose from and such a wide variety of superpowers to mine for moves than you can get from four nearly identical reptiles.

After the big group-wide session was finished, we had knocked out this much of the unlockables.

Technically, you don’t just pick one character in Cosmic Invasion. You take two characters and can swap to your second superhero on the fly at any time AND you can execute double team moves with the press of a button. Each character has their own life bar too, so it’s really hard to die. Unless some twerp you’re playing with takes all the health even if they’re full, DAD! Sure, you can mash buttons if you want, but it only takes a little practice to be able to pull off combos. In theory if you’ve got the right group of people, you should be able to easily juggle enemies from one player to another like no brawler ever before. I do have one petty complaint about that: the juggling can continue long after you’ve inflicted lethal damage on an enemy. That sounds like it could be fun, but it eventually became obnoxious while playing with psychotic children who thought it would NEVER get old to keep bouncing the lifeless carcasses of enemies while everyone else waited for them to actually walk forward and continue playing the rest of the game. There was at least one kid every stage who did this, to the point that everyone waiting for their turns had to yell “STOP JUGGLING AND MOVE!” It should never have come to that. Again, cute in theory, but annoying as all hell in practice.

For the most part, MCI (what an unfortunate acronym) avoids having enemies linger on the edges of the screen, which is my #1 brawling pet peeve. But, it does still happen, and a couple bosses even feel tailored around it, like Thanos Finnegan. He has a ballsack on his chin-e-gan. Killed half the universe but they came back again. Poor old Thanos Finnegan-egan-egan.

Other than the juggling stuff, if there’s a means to keep the beat-em-up action from becoming stale, it was probably done here. I can’t stress enough how unique each character in the game feels, which is especially impressive given the roster size. However, I’m not the biggest fan of upgradable stats in arcade-style brawlers. For something like Castle Crashers? It’s fine, I guess. For stuff like this? The problem with them is that upgradable stats discourage players from swapping characters in the middle of a quest, which means it has the exact opposite effect of what a large roster of characters is meant to do: keep things fresh. Go ahead and swap, but you’ll be playing level six or seven or eight with a character still on their base stats. GO AHEAD! SWAP! What, you don’t want to anymore?

Some of the dialog is so self-referential and fourth-wall breaking that you would swear it was meant for Deadpool.

And also, I guess I have to mention that the roster was very disappointing for basically everyone. Missing from Marvel Cosmic Invasion: Thor, Hulk, Captain Marvel, Bucky, Doctor Strange, Falcon, Blade, Starlord, Groot, Gamora, Deadpool, Daredevil, Punisher, Ant-Man, Vision, Black Widow, Colossus, Nightcrawler, War Machine, Beast, Drax, Cyclops, Gambit, Wasp, Shang-Chi, and the entire Fantastic Four, among others. Kind of annoying since characters nobody wanted like Nova, Phyla-Vell (well Sasha the Kid liked her at least), and f*cking Beta Ray Bill (are you kidding me? Over Thor?) are in this. I’m not entirely sure how balanced the characters are. Whoever used She-Hulk seemed to have had the most fun, as she has a wide range of attacks while also having some of the hardest-hitting moves. In general, the whole game does an excellent job of feeling like strikes are impactful and violent. Now, there is a catch: some characters fly, and some don’t. Sometimes enemies feel like they’re tailored for flying heroes, but if nobody is using a flyer? It can get a little frustrating. They kind of reminded me of the Baxter fight from TMNT in that it was hard to line-up with the flyers properly.

There were like twenty people over at our house during that first play session, and two things happened that broke my heart. This isn’t a bit I’m doing as a joke. I literally mean “I got a pit in my stomach” heartbroken. The first thing was that several kids opted out of playing because they had already watched their favorite Twitchers or YouTubers playing Marvel Cosmic Invasion and somehow had gotten everything they needed out of this without ever picking up a controller. Why have fun playing a game when you can watch someone else have fun? I couldn’t believe it. It actually made me almost sick to my stomach that a lot of kids would rather watch some idiot play games instead of playing themselves. By the way, those kids then went on to smugly spoil all the hidden characters, level details, and boss fights for everyone else. They were the absolute worst, to the point that my normally jovial father, seriously the nicest guy in any room he’s in, said something to the effect of “no more games when these Twitch kids are around. They can’t take a hint to not ruin it for everyone else.” And they really couldn’t. Not little kids, mind you. Ages 11 to 14 or 15, and I guess it was their way of showing how smart they were to everyone else that they remembered what happened in a video they saw that week. They kept it up the entire time and simply didn’t give a sh*t how annoying it was. The second heartbreaking thing was that every single kid saw the missing characters as the cynical cash grab for future DLC packs that it was. There’s interviews with the development team that say they really just wanted some oddball selections, but why do that at the risk of alienating fans of MAJOR comic characters unless you were certain you could make up for it later with DLC? For the kids, there was literally no question in their minds that both the missing heroes and the missing supervillains (no Doctor Doom, no Green Goblin, etc) were missing because they’re going to be up-sold later. Again, not a bit I’m doing. There is something tragic that kids are that jaded about why games are the way they are. If that doesn’t hurt your heart, I don’t know what will. I hate cynicism, but it was totally justified and likely accurate. Gaming shouldn’t be cynical for children. It should be magical. I hate that it’s come to this. I know that it’s a business and they have to make money, but don’t turn kids into cynics. It’s not cool.

So what’s there to complain about? Well, besides the juggling and some of the weird character selection options? Honestly, I don’t know what more anyone could want out of a brawler. I guess the tutorial took forever and almost caused the game to get shut off during that party. And some of the extra goals in the game aren’t awesome. Hitting X amount of a specific move using a specific character on a specific level being a check mark? What if nobody picks that character? Or sometimes the goal is not taking any damage from a swarm of enemies. Those goals became so distracting, especially since you have to pause the game to see what the goals are, that we all voted to not attempt them anymore. We also took that pledge when it was just me, Dad, and Sasha the Kid replaying this for this review. And everyone seemed to agree that some of the bosses were letdowns, especially the final boss. I think everyone was so unimpressed with Annihilus as the finale that they really thought someone else would be the final boss (except my nephew who thought he was “very Shredder-like”). Oh and the whole battle against Silver Surfer was a groan-inducing slog that had everyone listless. Actually, none of the bosses that become characters are exceptional. BUT, there’s also a ton of fantastic boss fights in this. I can’t stress enough: we were NEVER bored playing this. It was just so good.

I guess I kind of wish there had been more things like these turrets that you can smack to take out waves of enemies. For the most part, the environments are REALLY well done. I don’t think any 2D game EVER has as many one-off visual gags as Marvel Cosmic Invasion has. There’s so many little winking nods to famous Marvel stories and characters. And luckily we had a few kids who told us when those things were coming before they showed up on the screen. Even after we asked them not to. All while their witless parents had a thousand yard stare, hopefully contemplating all their birth control choices that led to this.

Probably the strangest thing I can say about Marvel Cosmic Invasion is that I was kind of over it as soon as I finished. That seems weird, because while I was playing it, I was thinking “this is probably the best brawler ever made! It does everything right.” I mean, it doesn’t, obviously, but it comes close enough that it’s hard to imagine how anyone could hope to top this take on a 90s style brawler. It’s like an all-star game of all your favorite arcade fist-throwers. Yet, now that I’ve kind of played it twice (during the party I only played two or three levels), I don’t really want to play it ever again. I have no interest in more levels or DLC. I’m good. I had a great time while it lasted. Me, Dad, and Sasha the Kid had fun running through it so I could actually do a proper review. I usually enjoy competently made brawlers, and this goes far beyond competently made. It’s a masterclass in cathartic beam ’em up action.

“MJ is going to be SO MAD when she finds out what we’re about to do. This is her thing. Meh. Maybe she’ll be down with it.”

But it’s also an empty calories game. This genre was perfect for arcades for a reason. It’s video game junk food. That’s fine, by the way. Gaming is a big tent and there’s room for brawlers. For a while, this genre was the dominant genre at this very blog because they’re really easy to review. Give me a variety of eye-catching set-pieces (even if they’re facades), a variety of moves, and OOMPHful hits that feel legitimately violent and I’m a happy camper. The only way you can screw it up is not enough variety, or moving off the formula too much, like what happened with the Digital Eclipse Power Rangers brawler that I didn’t like. Even then, their heart was in the right place. Brawlers can get tiring. I enjoyed playing through Invasion’s fifteen levels. Doing that twice sounds exhausting to me. Maybe that’s why the genre works. I guess that’s why I’m annoyed by upgradable stats in games like this. Who on Earth would want to play this over and over again? It’s perfectly fine for a game to be a one-and-done. Besides, you need good games like that to make those good games you do want to replay again and again mean something. It should be special when a game has replay value. It should be equally special to play a game that’s fantastic, tons of fun, and has no replay value at all.
Verdict: YES!
This is Cathy Vice reminding you to help control the annoying child population. Have your mate spayed or neutered! Whether they like it or not. Merry Christmas, everyone!