Retro Review: Captain America and the Avengers

Now, here's a game from childhood I'm re-experiencing for the first time in years: Captain America and the Avengers for the Sega Mega Drive. Now my memory of this game is dominated by the summer of '95 in which I obsessively played this game every morning as the summer sun (remember the days when it was sunny in summer?) beat in through the window. It was an addiction, a love even, and I carried those fond memories with me. Nostalgia is a dodgy thing. The Thundercats was as good as I remembered it to be.

This game is not.

We get to play as Captain America, Iron Man, Vision and Hawkeye. For the record, Hawkeye and Vision suck balls, so you'll spend most your time alternating between Cap and Iron Man.

The story is about...er, umm...well, Red Skull is up to something...I think he wants to destroy the Earth or something. He mostly just chuckles to himself evilly. Anyway, there's a lot of bad guys about, so kick their arses. Now, the actual game play is okay. Your attacks involve punching, kicking and throwing your enemies. The movements are quick and fluid. Unfortunately, there is no real variety and strategy involved in defeating the enemy. Every bad guy and boss is the same really, you just beat the shit out of them till they fall down and stay down. Annoyingly, every time your character gets hit, the mighty superhero falls to the ground with a cry of "NOOOOO!" which quickly becomes irritating.

Let's talk about the dialogue. This is where it all starts to go wrong in this game. And where this game goes from being an okay game to being a cheesy-as-fuck piece of rubbish that people don't play...they point at it and laugh.

The first instance is when confronted by two mid-level bosses. When warned by then to 'not disturb us', I kid you not, our hero replies with:

"Why should it go well?" Is that suppose to actually mean something? Did that actually make sense to someone when the wrote the script? The hilarity continues when we get to the end of the level to confront the bad guy, Whirlwind, Captain America says:

Typical heroic thing to say. What does the bad guy retort with?

"You will be the one escaping!" ?????????

What in fucks name does that actually mean? Does it mean that Captain America will be trying to escape Whirlwind? And don't the bad guys try to kill the hero's instead of actually letting them escape. This makes no sense whatsoever. I mean, I know Data East was a Japanese company but there is actual spoken English in this game (a rarity back in the day) did it not occur to someone when they were recording the English vocals that it made shit-all sense.

Well, obviously not.

And the fact that all of the voices are done by one person, only serves to add to the lame, cheesiness of the dialogue. It's just as well there are no female characters in this...

There's some cameo's from other non-playable Avengers, Wonder Man, Wasp and Quicksilver all appear. I'm sure Magneto is so proud of his son. Leaving the Brotherhood of Mutants to join the Avengers is one thing - but appearing in their cheesy-as-fuck game...?

Lastly, should you see the game over screen, it is accompanied by the same voice as every character in the game, calling out heroically:

BE A HERO AND SAVE AMERICA!!!

Fuck off.

Surprisingly, I've never really read Avenger comics. I love Marvel, but the Avengers? Nah. It wouldn't surprise me if the reason has got to be because this naff game game was my introduction to them. I mean, if I was introduced to the X-Men or Spiderman through their craptacular games, I would have probably given them a wide berth as well.

What we have here is an average game with some fun moments, but is so dominated by the utter hilarity of bad translations, camp super heroes and cheesy execution. Play it if you want a laugh, then forget about it.

Here's the first level from my play through on YouTube

Click here for a link to the Captain America and the Avengers playlist