"Marvel's Avarvels puts an almost admirable degree of effort into not resembling a live service game for some ways into the campaign. [...] These first few missions mostly play like running down one corridor after another, but hey, they're nice corridors; there's an actual story focus, and at the end of some of the corridors, there's colorful boss fights against Marvel supervillains like Taskmaster (registered trademark) and Abomination (registered trademark). But then the live service shit starts insidiously to creep in. [...] The lovely, approachable face flakes off bit by bit to reveal the cold, eyeless skull underneath. "You unlocked the confusingly laid-out mission hub area! You unlocked the gear-crafting station! The cosmetic-crafting station! The faction missions! The storage lockers! Your next mission objective is to talk to all the gear vendors; we will literally hold up the plot until you fucking do that!" And every single one of them has a line of dialogue specifically designed to guilt you if you leave without buying anything. "Oh, you don't want any new emotes? Welp, better tell the kids that it'll be sawdust porridge for dinner again." Then all those story-focused corridor missions are replaced by missions in which you go to one of a handful of pocket sandboxes, are directed to a specific location, and all the way there, copy-pasted side objectives appear all around us like we're dodging mortar shells in fucking no man's land. "There's a treasure box nearby! There's a group of bland copy-pasted enemies nearby! Why not kill them before you kill the group of bland copy-pasted enemies you actually came here to deal with?" It's like being trapped in the IKEA showroom when all you want is a fucking egg whisk!"