Marvel’s Avengers: 9 Essential Tips And Tricks For Those Starting Out

Marvel’s Avengers is playable on Xbox One, PS4, PC, and Google Stadia, offering both a single-player, story-focused campaign about Kamala Khan and multiplayer, loot-focused follow-up campaign about the reassembled Avengers. For the most part, the game does an okay job of teaching you how everything works, but it can still be a bit confusing. If you’re running into a bit of trouble, we’ve compiled nine tips and tricks to follow when you’re first starting out.

Just to clarify, these are general recommendations for how to play. We’re currently working on specific guides for individual characters if you’re looking for best practices in how to sculpt your ideal Ms. Marvel, Captain America, Iron Man, Black Widow, Hulk, or Thor. If you’re still trying to figure out whether you want to pick up the game, check out GameSpot’s early review impressions for Marvel’s Avengers.

Play Reassemble First

When you boot up Marvel’s Avengers, you’ll have the choice of playing Reassemble or Avengers Initiative. The former is the single-player campaign, while the latter is an assortment of story-focused multiplayer missions. Though it may seem fun to immediately jump into some co-op with a buddy, it’s better to go with Reassemble first.

Avengers Initiative takes place after the events of Reassemble, so a few of the missions and storylines you’ll run into in Avengers Initiative will spoil the single-player campaign in Reassemble. Reassemble itself does feature a few multiplayer missions, so if you want to play with friends, we advise you to just rotate through the few offered there until everyone has had a chance to beat Marvel’s Avengers’ 14-hour single-player campaign.

Don’t Worry About Gear Too Much

As a follow-up, you don’t have to worry too much about your gear and power level in the Reassemble campaign. You’ll regularly find gear that’s at your current level or a bit higher. And about halfway through Reassemble, you’ll unlock shopkeepers that will sell you high-level gear for all those resources you’ve been accumulating up to that point.

Additionally, you can use some of those resources to just boost the power level of the gear you currently have. Go ahead and do so when you can, you’ll find plenty throughout the campaign. Don’t stress.

Unlock Running Attacks Early On

In Marvel’s Avengers, you’re allowed to build your heroes in any way you see fit. We recommend you at least invest in one of the running attacks for each hero, though. Each hero has two: a fast running attack that typically trips up one enemy and a powerful running attack that usually deals damage to several people. Invest in the one that fits the build you’re making for that particular hero (or just both if you’ve got points to spare).

Almost every fight in Marvel’s Avengers begins in one of two ways: Your group and an enemy group running at each other from opposing sides, or you running from one point to another with enemies trying to stop you. Either way, having the ability to start the fight with an attack can put you at a nice advantage right from the get-go.

Don’t Forget You Can Cancel Attacks

Quite a few of the attacks in Marvel’s Avengers have long wind-up animations or charges, especially for Hulk and Thor. Enemies won’t let up and allow you to hit them, though, and oftentimes trying to stun you and cancel the attack while it’s charging up. If you’re about to be hit and you think your attack isn’t going to finish and land in time, consider cancelling it to quickly roll out of the way or counter before attacking again.

There are three ways to cancel an attack: jump, dodge, or using a Heroic ability. The first two are ideal. Only use your Heroic ability to cancel an attack if the situation allows you to still use the powerful move to its full potential. Otherwise, it’s wasteful to use a Heroic ability as a means of defense.

Fill That Stun Meter

See that small bar that’s just below an enemy’s health? That’s their stun meter. It fills up as you deal damage with attacks that cause stun damage (usually your heavy attacks). You probably won’t be able to do so very much early on, as both Hulk and Kamala deal tremendous amounts of damage–their attacks will likely end a target before they’re fully stunned. But it’s an important meter to keep track of, especially once you start using characters like Iron Man and Black Widow, who both have attacks that deal a lot of stun damage.

When a target is fully stunned, you can perform a finisher move called a Takedown on them. These moves are typically flashy animations that look really cool. You want to do these takedown moves for two reasons: one, they do a lot of damage and usually just defeat the target outright, and two, some of the best mid- to late-game gear have special effects that activate when a finisher is done. If your hero has gear equipped that activates a special effect after a takedown, you should ensure that character also has gear that increases the power of their stun damage.

Do Character-Specific HARM Missions

Reassemble does a decent enough job of giving you a general breakdown of how each Avenger plays. However, for a better idea as to the specifics of each individual character, you should play their HARM Mission.

The HARM room is basically your run-of-the-mill horde mode, but there are six extra tutorial-specific variations that teach you how to use each character. Do these as soon as they unlock–they are especially helpful for the characters you unlock in the mid- to late campaign, as Reassemble kind of glosses over how those characters work in order to maintain the pace of the story.

Know How Close You Are To Leveling Up

All three of the meters for your Hero abilities will refill upon the character leveling up. So if you see that your chosen Avenger is about to level up, take the opportunity to just go ham and use your special abilities with reckless abandon.

Start On Avenger Iconic Missions As Soon As You Can

Speaking of character-specific missions, you should complete the unique iconic missions for each character early on as well. The first one you’ll unlock is for Hulk (the mission is called Condition: Green).

These unique character operations are how you unlock the more traditional comic book-looking outfits for each Avenger, and they all lead to good loot drops too. Each one has a specific mission and multiple steps; however, some steps require you to defeat a certain amount of enemies or use a character’s abilities in a specific way. So start on these character missions as they unlock so that you can use the Reassemble campaign to fulfill most of the requirements. It will save you from having to grind in Avengers Initiative later.

Focus On Turrets And Flyers First

Combat in Marvel’s Avengers can get hectic fairly quickly. Having decent area-of-effect attacks is important, but an easy way to ensure you don’t get overwhelmed is to focus on the flying enemies and turrets first.

Both are almost always above you in some way, which puts them outside of camera shot for most of combat. Just flee from the crowd on the ground and take out the air support/turrets first and you’ll have a much easier time with the remaining group of enemies. If you’re playing multiplayer, send your Iron Man or Black Widow to deal with the aerial targets and turrets–both are far better suited to the task than their companions.