Marvel: Contest Of Champions has become something of a sensation in mobile gaming. Originally an experiment of sorts to see if Kabam and Marvel could use popular superheroes to make an engaging fighting game, it’s grown into much more.
Now, it’s an enormously popular title that has inspired its own line of comic books and even generated new characters. Venompool (a combination of Venom and Deadpool) and Civil Warrior (Captain America-meets-Iron Man) are two playful mash-up characters they’ve come up with, but Guillotine was an entirely new concept.
As a fighting game with some RPG elements and a huge variety of challenges and co-op competitions, Contest Of Champions has a great deal to offer. But it’s actually the characters that make it the most interesting. In addition to some new characters like those just mentioned, this game has also been quite consistent in that it’s often updated with new characters relevant to whatever Marvel happens to be doing in film or television.
Earlier this summer, that meant the addition of a few X-Men characters who had starred in the film X-Men: Apocalypse. Beast has been around in the X-Men film franchise for a while now, and Nightcrawler (among other newcomers) was praised in some positive reviews that noted that Apocalypse didn’t have the clutter you might expect from a crowded franchise adding even more superheroes. At any rate, both characters were thrown into the Contest Of Champions over the summer, having never appeared there before. They were attainable through special “arena” challenges, and were also plugged in as opposition in some of the game’s quests.
Going back a little bit further, Contest Of Champions has also served as a sort of signal of Marvel projects to come. Last October, for instance, Elektra was put into the game for the first time, which really marked her first significant appearance in modern gaming outside of massive ensemble titles like Marvel Heroes (an MMO). Elsewhere, Elektra’s most notable presence was in an online slot machine game that was made after her film appearances in the 2000s grew her popularity enough to warrant her own spinoffs. But even there, she was effectively a thematic backdrop for the slot arcade. In Contest Of Champions she was an exciting, ninja-like character, much like the one that was introduced soon after in Daredevil‘s second season on Netflix.
But while Marvel has used this mobile game as a vessel for rolling out new characters, celebrating film releases, and hinting at things to come, they also occasionally fill in the cracks by plugging in beloved characters who just haven’t been included yet. That’s what happened late last September when Kabam updated the game with Quake and all her badass abilities. The Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. also known as Daisy Johnson is now a playable character for those who are able to acquire her. And as Marvel pointed out, she’s fully capable of handling her business with or without her team behind her.
It’s only the latest exciting update in a game that just keeps giving!