Marvel Rivals Review: The Fights Are Great, the Lobby Is Not

Marvel Rivals has been out since December 2024, but it's still very much the game everyone on Steam has an opinion about. NetEase's free-to-play hero shooter throws dozens of Marvel characters into fast, chaotic team fights with destructible arenas and goofy team-up powers, and almost two years in it's pulling over 300,000 Steam reviews and counting, with roughly three out of four of them positive overall. We read through a batch of the most recent reviews to see what's actually sticking, good and bad, beyond the marketing, and the picture that comes through is a game that's still winning people over on pure gameplay while losing some of them right back over how it feels to actually sit in a lobby.

Pros

• Matches are quick and snappy, and more than one reviewer specifically called out the pace as the thing that keeps them coming back for "one more round."
• The Marvel roster lands. Seeing niche picks like Gorr or Luna Snow show up in-game genuinely delighted at least one reviewer who reacted like they'd spotted a celebrity, which says a lot about how much care went into the character work.
• It's noticeably better with friends. Several reviewers who admitted they're not great players still said squading up carried the fun on its own, even through rough matches.
• Hardware isn't a hard gate: one player reported it running "surprisingly well" on a rig below the official minimum spec, which matches the generally modest system requirements.
• There's real staying power here too, with some reviewers logging genuinely enormous hours and still calling it their favorite game, period.

Cons

• The community is the single biggest complaint in our sample, and reviewers didn't mince words, describing the fanbase and voice chat as toxic, with specific call-outs for racist and misogynistic behavior.
• Matchmaking takes a beating too, with at least one reviewer flatly calling it the worst they'd experienced, paired with frustration at teammate quality.
• A chunk of negative reviews are vague "this is bad, it's lacking quality" type complaints without much detail, which makes them hard to action but still worth flagging as real sentiment.
• Some of the praise skews shallow, with a reviewer whose main takeaway was character appearances rather than anything about mechanics or content, a reminder that not every one of the 300,000+ reviews is grading the game as a game.
• The sample also included at least one review that read as genuinely excited about the character roster while still ending up marked as a thumbs-down overall, which hints at a broader frustration with something other than the heroes themselves, likely the matchmaking and community issues above spilling over into otherwise positive impressions.

Performance & PC

On paper this isn't a demanding game: the minimum spec asks for a Core i5-6600K or Ryzen 5 1600X, a GTX 1060 or RX 580, 16 GB of RAM and 70 GB of storage (SSD recommended), while the recommended tier bumps you to a Core i5-10400 or Ryzen 5 5600X with an RTX 2060 Super or RX 5700 XT. That's a reasonably low bar for a modern live-service shooter, and it tracks with what reviewers actually report: one player specifically praised how well it ran on a system under the listed requirements, and crucially, none of the ten recent reviews we read flagged crashes, freezes, or stability problems. We didn't see any Steam Deck or Linux-specific comments in this batch either, so take that as an absence of evidence rather than a guarantee, but on the stability front the game seems to be in decent shape right now. For a hero shooter pushing destructible environments and a roster that keeps growing, that's a reasonably good sign; the technical complaints that do exist in the wider review pool tend to cluster around server-side matchmaking rather than the client itself, which fits with what our sample flagged as the bigger issue.

How it compares

Counter-Strike 2 is the obvious reference point for "huge free-to-play Valve/NetEase-scale shooter with a famously rough community," though CS2's tactical, round-based tension is a world away from Rivals' superhero chaos. Dota 2 is the closer cousin in spirit: another free, hero-driven, Valve-made game that's thrived for over a decade on character variety and team synergy, which is exactly the lane Rivals is trying to run in with a faster, more arcade-y pace. WARDOGS, still in Early Access and built around massively multiplayer combat on a much smaller scale, is a useful contrast for anyone wondering what an unfinished, scrappier take on big online shooters looks like next to Rivals' fully live, heavily populated launch state.

Summary

Marvel Rivals earns its "Mostly Positive" reputation the honest way: the actual game, when you're in a match with people who aren't actively ruining your night, is fast, generous with fan-service, and easy to run on a mid-range PC. The catch, based on what reviewers keep repeating, isn't the shooter itself, it's the ecosystem around it, specifically matchmaking that frustrates even invested players and a chat culture that's driven away people who otherwise liked what they were playing. If you've got friends to squad with and can mute strangers without much thought, this is an easy recommendation, especially since it costs nothing to find out for yourself. If solo queue with voice chat on sounds exhausting to you, go in with that expectation set correctly rather than skipping it altogether. Plenty of reviewers in our sample stuck around for hundreds, even thousands, of hours despite the same gripes, which tells you something about how good the core loop is once you look past the lobby chat.