Dotemu Does What the MCU Won’t

Of all of gaming’s many genres, few have remained as spiritually pure as the 2D beat ‘em up. From the early arcade favorites like Final Fight to more recent home console hits like River City Girls, the simple premise of walking in a straight line and dropkicking waves of baddies is timeless — even elegant — and hasn’t really warranted any kind of groundbreaking mechanical overhaul throughout the years.

Titles like Streets of Rage 4 (2020) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge (2022) may have given their classic franchises a facelift, but their success mostly stems from sticking to what’s always worked: punch, kick, progress, with a couple of quality-of-life tweaks tucked in. That’s exactly what publisher Dotemu’s latest retro-inspired beat ‘em up, Marvel Cosmic Invasion, offers in spades, albeit with a little extra juice from its comic book origins.

Rolling Stone recently previewed an early build of Marvel Cosmic Invasion (out later this year) and walked away impressed by both the simple pleasures it provides and the ways in which it incorporates characters and lore not currently seen in Disney’s MCU. Even in a year packed with old school-inspired revivals, Cosmic Invasion makes a (mostly) marvelous first impression.

Back to formula

Published by Dotemu, a French-based studio that’s made its name as the industry’s premier outlet for reviving old arcade-based IP from the Eighties and Nineties, Cosmic Invasion follows the framework laid by the company’s previous titles, Streets of Rage 4 and Shredder’s Revenge. With a pixelated 2D aesthetic reminiscent of the 16-bit SNES era, it both looks and feels like a game made ages ago. While Dotemu’s other big 2025 releases, Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound and Absolum (the studio’s sole original IP) reimagine the spirit of older games with some modern embellishments, Cosmic Invasion takes a more purist approach to its design — with one caveat.

Players can pick from one of 15 Marvel superheroes to fight their way through linear, sequential levels, with up to four people able to join at any time. The twist is that everyone is asked to select two characters, which can be swapped out in real time, meaning that up to eight fighters can appear on screen at any given time.

The character swap system adds what’s essentially the only new idea created for the game, and even then, it’s not entirely original; fighting game fans have been playing Marvel titles this way since 1996’s X-Men vs. Street Fighter introduced the tag-team mechanics. But it’s extremely rare to see this kind of selection in a standard action side-scroller and adds a fresh layer to what’s otherwise intentionally dated gameplay.

After selecting two characters, which range from obvious favorites like Spider-Man and Captain America to deeper cut like the spacefaring Nova and Thor stand-in Beta Ray Bill, players are dropped into straightforward levels where they’re tasked with walking ahead, beating up groups of enemies, and repeating that loop for the entirely of the game. Each character has a base suite of moves including light and heavy attacks, dodges or blocks (depending on the hero), and special moves that expend a stamina meter. There’s also multiple tag-team moves that call in the secondary hero to fight with the main on-screen for a single strike that can be spammed ad nauseum.

As with most games of this ilk, movement is limited to walking in four directions across the flat plane, with the levels we previewed mainly sticking to walking to the right to progress. Movement can be sluggish depending on the character, but that’s by design. It’s more about hunkering down for button mashing until everyone you see is dead. The biggest changeup in the formula is that many enemies (and heroes) can fly, meaning that at any given time there’s actually two planes to focus on between the ground level and the air.

In true arcade fashion, each level ends with a boss battle whose unique patterns must be memorized to deliver critical blows. In the preview build, there were two levels: the streets of New York culminating in a fight with the villain Beetle, and the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier that ends with a showdown with Taskmaster. Although neither are overly complicated, the Taskmaster battle has a fun schtick where players have to knock out the boss’ Captain America-like shield, leaving him vulnerable to attacks for a limited time.

A vanilla experience with Marvelous flare

For anyone not instantly smitten at the idea of a Nineties era beat ‘em up with little to no modern advancements, the core appeal of Cosmic Invasion will come down to the use of the Marvel IP. The game’s predictably paper-thin story sees the villain Annihilus waging an attack on a galactic scale, bringing with him high level threats like Thanos and Galactus himself to the fray. Many of these characters resurged in popularity in the 2000s when Marvel made space stories a big deal again — leading to the reintroduction of the Guardians of the Galaxy that would later inspire the hit films.

In the demo, nine characters are playable, and there’s some immediate standouts. Captain America, Storm, Spider-Man, and Wolverine will all feel familiar to anyone who’s played a Marvel vs. Capcom game. During this year’s Summer Game Fest, the developers at Tribute Games told Rolling Stone that this was intentional for these particular characters, with whom many fans already have a preconception for how they should feel in action.

All four play incredibly well and lean toward speedier movement, and versions of moves pulled from the Capcom fighting games. Cap’s shield throw is great for crowd control; Wolverine and Spidey are adept at rushing in close for multi-hit combos; Storm can electrify (and fry) just about anything on screen. Venom, too, has shades of his former in-game incarnations but is more of a beefy brawler than an area control type like he is in the fighting series.

But outside of these known entities, many of the new characters shine. Phyla-Vell (who bears the names Quasar, Captain Marvel, and more in the comics) is top notch — and probably the best all-around character previewed. With a massive sword, and the ability to fly and teleport, she can dominate all planes and practically serves as a one-woman army. Nova, too, is a space-based character that packs a punch and agility to boot. She-Hulk is easily the slowest character, but her devastating blows and wide reach make up for her shortcomings.

The only complete stinker of the bunch is sadly Rocket Raccoon, who mostly uses range-based gunplay to attack, which feels different from the rest of the cast in all the wrong ways. With a weak aerial skillset, playing Rocket was essentially the only major challenge presented in the demo, and it wasn’t a fun hurdle to surmount. Although there’s a pretty stellar hit-to-miss ratio with the existing roster, Rocket shows the downside to having so many playable characters: even though it adds diversity to the game, it proves that there will be imbalance. Some heroes are just going to suck, although by existing popularity they’ll likely still have their defenders.

Rocket also embodies some of the larger issues with the game’s design, especially in terms of how the two-plane ground versus air combat works. For flying characters like Phyla-Vell, Nova, and Storm, taking to the air simply requires a double jump, but it locks players into the airborne layer to essentially walk as they would normally. This means that enemies below can hit you, but it’s also basically no different than playing on the street level. Swapping between the two can be cumbersome and doesn’t always foster fluid combo building. Worse is when a character has paltry jump attacks, which can break the flow of the action when a single aerial enemy buzzes around the map while you chase it playing whack-a-mole.

Cosmic Invasion is at its best when everything devolves into controlled chaos. With the right characters, chaining together bombastic attacks and flashy moves can easily rack up 500-hit combos, which makes the down time and occasionally sluggish pace more of a chore during the in between moments. Levels are extremely linear, with no branching paths, collectibles, or even secrets to find (that we’ve seen so far). Stages are also somewhat geographically tight, often funneling players into narrow corridors to fight, but even more open spaces don’t feel as expansive as they do in games like Streets of Rage 4 or Shredder’s Revenge.

The result is a more barebones experience. Without anything to discover, it’s a meat and potatoes action jaunt that’s more about mindlessly smacking baddies in the face, whose ceiling for skill and overall fun is mostly dependent on which hero you’re using. Thankfully, the vast majority of them are extremely enjoyable to play. With four still to be revealed, and a likely guarantee that more will come down the line, Cosmic Invasion’s greatest strength is in the Marvel IP first, and solid gameplay second.

Whether or not the rest of the game opens up more variety of action or surprises to stumble on remains to be seen. As is, it’s a highly accessible entry for anyone looking to punch bad guys as their favorite hero. It might not have the same depth as other games of its genre, but there’s plenty of dumb fun to be had.

Marvel Cosmic Invasion releases later this year for Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.