Marvel Cosmic Invasion is an exciting game, I'll tell you that right away. Created by Tribute Games and Dotemu, this is a true classic beat 'em up style game. Waves of thugs come at you from both sides as you punch, kick and fight your way through. This is radical, and I mean this in the era-appropriate sense of the word. In fact, I'm starting to feel strongly that Marvel games are best when they're radical.
Marvel Cosmic Invasion is both a classic side-scrolling action game and a handwritten sonnet to the comics and cartoons of times gone by. Characters slamming old spandex, Iron Man soaring through levels in bright red and yellow, She-Hulk bursting through a monitor with a one-two punch of green and purple. The eyes are happy, the ears perk up to the beatpop tunes, and all is right with the world.
The story is also a deep version of the cartoon. Your team of Marvel heroes fights against Annihilus, who attacks Earth from the Negative Zone with an army of otherworldly forces at his back. This is all in the spirit of yesterday's X-Men, a reminder of past joys. You're in the midst of a space adventure, and you don't care if everything happens in a hurry. She-Hulk yells, “Catch those arms” as they drop elbows from the top of the screen, sending enemies sprawling across the floor. Ghost Rider, wearing a glass space helmet instead of a skull face, rides across the screen on a motorcycle with flaming blue tires. A little cheesy? Certainly. But who cares? It's fun.
God. I'm so grateful that Marvel is fun again. Thanks to this, Marvel Rivals and Marvel Tokon, the franchise has freed itself from the big-budget films and high-end cinematic aesthetics that can rob a franchise of its power. What do I mean? Marvel at its best meant be cheesy, cartoonish. His characters can lose all charm if their roots are torn away. In Marvel Cosmic Invasion, it's the opposite: Playing Iron Man had me smiling wider than any other Marvel game in the last ten years.
It's weird too, because I don't have a particularly strong personal connection to the Marvel era that Cosmic Invasion holds on a pedestal here. I'm 27 years old, which means I never got to play the classic arcade games. Maybe I remember playing a snippet of Michael Jackson's “Moonwalker”? But even so, I can look at a classic and see the connection, I can see the hallmarks of the genre and see how they are championed here.
The thing is, Marvel Cosmic Invasion's love for this era is so true that playing it feels like a kind of ghostly nostalgia. I understand. The game takes you on a journey, and if you raise your hands in the air and scream like you're supposed to, you'll be taken back to a time you'll never be able to remember.
You simply can't experience that feeling if you just try to imitate superhero movies. I'm so glad that games like Marvel Cosmic Invasion are still coming out and are a style of hero media that treats those heroes for who they are. I would recommend it to anyone, young or old, with real nostalgic memories or just ghostly ones, just as a reminder of what these characters are about, what these stories are about.
