Marvel Cosmic Invasion preview: Marvel heroes unite for a beat-em-up beauty

Marvel: Cosmic Invasion was a lovely surprise announcement earlier this year, and as a fan of retro games I’m always happy to see modern titles adopt the old pixel-art style.

At Summer Game Fest 2025 I got to play a brief but action-packed demo of the new Marvel beat-em-up game and can confidently say it’s a lot of fun, and does a good job of challenging the player without taking the difficulty too far. In fact I think there’s an argument to be made that it was too easy, but to be fair I did play the demo with another person so perhaps a singleplayer run would have put up more of a fight.

There are several popular Marvel characters to choose from and a few that you don’t typically see in games such as this, which is nice.

The full roster is yet to be announced but so far there’s Spider-Man, Venom, Wolverine, Storm, Phyla-Vell, Captain America and Nova.

Each character has a unique-ish moveset, though they tend to have a mix of up-close melee moves and more ranged abilities. Every character also has a supermove they can unleash when their meter is charged, dealing heavy damage usually through an area-of-effect attack.

You’re not just picking one character either, you pick two at a time and can switch between them on the fly. I found choosing a character with good ground abilities like Venom combined with a flyer like Nova was the most effective but it’s really up to you.

What I liked most about Marvel: Cosmic Invasion so far though is its style. It looks like the comic pages have come to life, and I was very fond of seeing characters like The Beetle from Spider-Man’s villain roster appear in the demo.

It definitely feels like one of those games you could replay over, and over, and over again, with each character, even more so with a friend.