A Look Back at Marvel’s Avengers Alliance

Greetings, True Believers!

Today we take a look back at Marvel’s Avengers Alliance. September 30th marks the sixth anniversary of the final day of this wonderfully simple game. I still miss it.

Marvel: Avengers Alliance was a turn-based social network game developed by Playdom in 2012. It is based on characters and storylines published by Marvel Comics and written by Alex Irvine. The game was available as an Adobe Flash application via the social-networking website Facebook, and via Playdom’s official website via an app. The app wasn’t directly connected to a user’s account so moving between the two platforms was not possible. You chose one or another.

In 2012, I was pretty excited for this little game to come out. I liked the premise of it and the design. On launch day I played a few levels and was a bit discouraged, so I dropped it for a month, but eventually I returned. I am not sure if I had changed, or the game had. Something clicked, and I was enjoying myself. Avengers Alliance was my jam. I had only been playing a few games on Facebook with Mrs. Multiverse, so this was like a fun breath of fresh air for me. Something I was familiar with, old friends that I could spend a few spare moments with a few times a day. There were friends that had joined me from the “real world”, but after a time most didn’t stick with it. In the end, only two remained. Even they didn’t play the last month. What was the point of sticking around?

The point, for me, was to celebrate the years of fun that this game had generated. There was a glitch in some of the reward mechanisms for completing tasks that I ended up reporting, and the nice folks at Playdom loaded my account up with a ton of extra gold. I was able to get everything that I had ever wanted in the game. What a great month of fun it has been.

At the end of the day this will be a favorite of mine, forever more. Sure, there were some misses in the hero offerings. Some things were pretty difficult to get by without purchasing gold. There were moments of too much repetition. I did have a few times when I took extended breaks, or I just would log in just to send heroes out on missions. All that aside. I give the game a solid B+ average over its lifetime. I only played it on Facebook and that’s where I kept my game play. This game weaned me off of playing more involved games that I would spend a majority of my free time in. It was a great casual game that I miss.

Excelsior!