Marvel Rivals Season Two is Still Polished, Though Maybe Not a Diamond

A few weeks ago, Marvel Rivals second season released, and with it came Emma Frost as a new Vanguard and the new Krakoa capture map. Compared to season one, season two’s general amount of content is a bit lower, but there are some nice new quality-of-life changes.

Beginning with the new hero Emma Frost, she’s a fun tank that can switch between long-range and close-range damage. Her up-close capabilities are incredibly strong and easily allow a skilled player to combo squishier targets down, so it makes sense for this mode to be a temporary ability. Her other abilities include a shield she can place to block damage, and what’s basically analogous to Hawkeye’s ultimate ability where she hits an enemy and makes a smaller target that can be shot and damaged. This second ability is really powerful because of how it can combo with her close-range diamond form, and how it can make targets vulnerable despite them retreating to cover. My one major complaint with Emma Frost is that her main attack is a psychic beam of damage that gradually ramps up in damage. Its range frequently disappoints me, especially because its damage isn’t particularly great. Even with the damage ramping up as you maintain fire on a target, it takes forever to ramp up, and then it plummets back to nothing annoyingly quickly. Since she’s a tank, her lower long-range damage output doesn’t make her bad by any means, but it is something I notice. As for her ultimate, it can be devastating if used correctly. Her ultimate creates a cone that damages targets, makes them unable to use their own ultimates, and eventually makes them incapable of doing anything other than moving towards Emma Frost. As a result, a skilled player can coordinate her ultimate with a teammate’s or use the environment to get some creative kills. In addition, Emma Frost’s ultimate is great for countering Bucky and preventing him from spamming his ultimate twenty times. Overall, Emma Frost brings some powerful utility and flexibility to her team.

The Krakoa capture map is fine. I’ve found that the capture maps, the ones where the mode is basically king of the hill, generally aren’t as good as the push/payload maps. Krakoa isn’t the best map in the game, but it’s far from the worst map. It’s a totally middle-of-the-road map and that’s fine. Just it being there to add variety is nice. It also adds in teleporters that allow you to traverse the map quickly, which is a nice addition that can add some really cool strategic play and adds a new layer of complexity for players to learn the map and its flow.

One area that does disappoint me, however, is the battlepass. Don’t get me wrong, some of the skins and other cosmetics look fantastic. But most of them are just kind of meh, if not outright bad (I genuinely think the new Squirrel Girl skin might be the ugliest skin in the game). After season one’s skins, I was really excited to see what season two had to offer, but none of it is a particularly exciting must-buy in my opinion.

Turning to the quality-of-life changes, the main new addition is the weekly challenge section. There are still the daily missions and seasonal missions, but now every week has a bunch of missions that award chrono tokens. It’s a nice change that I like because sometimes it felt like trying to complete the battlepass in seasons zeros and one was a race against the clock. Season two also has a bunch of limited time events with free skins. I’ll never complain about a free game providing free limited time events.

Overall, Marvel Rivals is still doing well. The output of seasonal content has shifted a little bit, but it’s not bad. I am a little disappointed Ultron didn’t get released at the beginning of the season with Emma Frost, but I expect he’ll be showing up real soon now anyway. Regardless, season two continues to push the game in a good direction that’s still worth playing.