Marvel Rivals “Path to Doomsday Avengers: Age of Ultron” PvE Mode is the Game’s New Gold Standard

In preparation for the widely anticipated Avengers: Doomsday, Marvel Rivals has been releasing limited time “Path to Doomsday” events for the game based off of The Avengers movies. The first event was not very good. It was an asymmetric mode that pitted the core Avengers team, or a group of any heroes, against a super buffed Loki in a single round of zone control. Loki stomped most of the time. I played this mode once as Loki, then never again because there were like two rewards you could get, and they weren’t even tied to the mode itself. The Age of Ultron mode, however, is a lot better. And while I may be sharing my review on it a little late because I think the mode has either expired already or is really close to, I can at least give a retrospective on it.

The Age of Ultron mode tasks the Avengers with fighting through a destroyed Avengers Tower against a horde of Ultra bots before facing off against the AI overlord. After defeating him the first time, players go inside a virtual world where they fight a few more waves of enemies before fighting Ultron for a final time. In total, it comes out to eleven waves per run. It’s simple enough and runs take anywhere from ten to twenty minutes, give or take. There are only two difficulties: Normal and Hard. You get all rewards from clearing Normal once and Hard on every playable character, which means only running the mission eight times total if you want to unlock everything. I vastly prefer this system to the annoying ones introduced in “Blood Hunt.” “Path to Doomsday” makes each mode feel worth running and doesn’t waste your time with hundreds of filler stages you have to slog through to get all rewards. I really hope that the Marvel Rivals developers can find a nice middle ground in the next PvE mode where you don’t have to invest 30 hours to unlock everything.

Turning to the heroes, you can play as Hulk, Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, Black Widow, Hawkeye, and Scarlet Witch. Hulk is probably the strongest. He’s able to put out pretty solid damage by just existing, and he can be pretty hard to kill. Captain America was probably the most disappointing character I played as. I’ve seen really solid Cap players in the mode, but when I tried him out to get the reward tied to clearing Hard with him, I think I died more than I did with any other character. His damage seemed mediocre at best and he didn’t have enough health to tank against the big enemies, and of course he’s melee focused. Thor surprised me. Thor is the only hero to have been featured in all three PvE modes so far, and this might be my favorite iteration. The way you build Thor is by boosting his throwing hammer, which allows you to spam his ultimate ability, so you have constant stuns and lightning AoEs on everything. Iron Man is fine. I found his best build to be just flying around and letting the missiles he fires do all the work, kinda like Moon Knight in “Blood Hunt.” Iron Man can be very squishy, so if you aren’t careful you can get deleted pretty quickly. Black Widow was another one I expected more out of. Again, I’ve seen really solid ones. When I played her, she was fine at best. She can output some pretty crazy damage if you hit your shots, but I found that hard to do when a horde of hundreds of enemies were right on top of me. I found Hawkeye a little better. He can get up to some pretty goofy explosive arrow crowd control shenanigans, which was a good time. As for Scarlet Witch, again she’s fine. She has some pretty good crowd control capabilities, but may struggle a little against bigger targets.

Overall, “Path to Doomsday: Age of Ultron” is my new gold standard for what the Marvel Rivals PvE modes should be like. There’s enough to do that it will keep you occupied for a few hours, but you don’t have to spend a small eternity grinding the same, repetitive mode while enemy numbers get bigger and bigger. I do think that the balancing here was a little spotty at times (I love getting one-shot by the big enemies), but it’s kind of hard to balance these modes sometimes. I know that this review is on the shorter side, but truth be told, there’s not a whole lot to talk about with this mode. It’s a lot simpler in terms of content, and the gameplay is largely the same (clear wave and get two upgrade cards that can change how your hero plays, or just increase your stats). There’s not outside meta-progression. It’s a good mode that I enjoyed my time with, and I don’t think that it overstayed its welcome. It had some fun rewards, like the MCU Ultron skin, and none of them were particularly egregious to unlock.