Despite a rather negative launch last year developer Crystal Dynamics and publisher Square Enix are still working on Marvel’s Avengers with some solid details finally revealed for the upcoming hero Hawkeye.
As with many reveals for this game the information on the character has been released through a “War table”, a streamed event which you can watch as an embed below.
Operation: Hawkeye – Future Imperfect is inspired by several comic arcs such as Old Man Hawkeye, the Matt Fraction run of the character and the same-named Future Imperfect. Players will go on a timey wimey adventure to an alternate reality post-apocalyptic world where the Kree attacked and a version of the Hulk known as Maestro is the big bad.
“After the A-Day disaster, Clint Barton and his mentee, Kate Bishop, were left on their own, deciding to search for the missing Nick Fury, and, in doing so, stumbled upon AIM’s secret Tachyon Project, resulting in Clint’s capture. Though Kate brought him back to the Avengers, peril doesn’t leave him: he falls into a coma, witnessing a future vision that leaves him confused and defeated when he finally wakes. Armed with his bow, sword, and knowledge of the grim events to come, it’s up to Hawkeye to stop the end of the world,” reads the description of this new content with many commas.
As a playable character Clint Barton, of course, mostly uses his bow but he does have some close combat chops. In the War Table it’s revealed that the character’s Ronin alter ego (which most people were introduced to in the Avengers: Endgame movie) has inspired the use of a sword.
Hawkeye has access to a rather wide range of arrows – 10 to be exact: grapple, boomerang, implosion, tripwire, rocket, pulsar, nightstorm, recovery and hunter’s arrows are all shown off. If you’ve ever wanted to play as one of these bow characters with a quiver full of tricks Hawkeye looks like the way to go.
Operation: Hawkeye – Future Imperfect is set to launch on 18th March. This is the same day that the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S versions of the game will be released. The DLC is free for all owners of the game, and the next-gen upgrade is free for owners from the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
For those enticed by this the game is 50 percent off but in a very weird way. Instead of the price simply being slashed on online stores, the discount is only available through certain outlets and physical retail stores. You will have to use the buy now section of the Marvel’s Avengers website to navigate to a store in your country that is supporting the promotion, as the discount is store-dependant.
South Africa, and many other countries / territories, aren’t even listed so it looks like we’ve been left out of the deal.
To us this entire “sale” seems more like a way to clear out unsold discs instead of actually giving customers a good deal and getting more people into the game with the release of new content and the next-gen upgrade. Not a great strategy for a game that infamously lost most of its playerbase.
For example, on PC, the 30-day average number of players was just 402 according to Steam Charts. This is abysmally low for a game built on co-op and enticing players to spend real money on skins to show off to their friends.
If you’ve been watching this game from afar check out our review of it at launch. Like most people we didn’t have the best time with the game and found it lacking in most areas. Adding playable characters like Hawkeye and Kate Bishop is nice, but the problems with Marvel’s Avengers are systemic and have / had very little to do with the number of heroes you can play as.
