The true test for how far a hero shooter is willing to go with its roster is how it handles its support role. Overwatch is proof that heroes like Mercy — and later Brigitte — can control the pace of a match and therefore the entire game, shattering metas and sparking new ones. Marvel Rivals season 1 continues to speedrun Overwatch’s history of balance with the release of the Invisible Woman, a hero that seems built to bend what it means to play support.
It would be hard not to with the bucket of abilities she carries with her. Susan Storm can heal, damage, push, pull, slow, shield, and, oh right, go invisible. Compare that to Mantis, a support who can heal and shoot and occasionally root enemies in place. Or Loki, who is a four-star-difficulty hero focused on misdirection. The Invisible Woman, however, is a four-star-difficulty hero who can simply do it all.
The catch is that she’s legitimately hard to play. Her primary fire is a projectile that passes through enemies or allies and loops back to her, causing a second hit as it returns. It sounds simple, but has more depth than you might realize at first, because where you aim determines how fast it ricochets. Bouncing your shots off the ground, near everyone’s feet, reduces the delay between the two hits and lets her burst people down quickly (or up quickly, if you’re healing). But if you ever have an ally in between you and an enemy, you want to line them up so you can hit them both at the same time. Something as simple as aiming depends on where you’re standing, where your targets are standing, and what kind of damage or healing output you want in that situation.
In other words: The Invisible Woman is tailor-made for people who feel constrained by the relative simplicity of the other support heroes. And even as someone still fairly new to Marvel Rivals (with over 3,000 hours in Overwatch), it’s refreshing to have a hero who can solve the sorts of problems healing can’t handle. Her Psionic Vortex is a big annoying orb for stalling enemies as they try to charge into your team, and her Force Physics can yank enemies toward her or toss them off the map. These are the sorts of abilities other heroes, like Jeff the Land Shark, have to use an entire ultimate for. She can also pull up a shield on allies that blocks damage, and her ultimate cloaks allies in a massive circle. You feel like you can do anything.
Playing the Invisible Woman is what I imagine it’s like to be an airplane pilot and actually know what all the knobs on a control panel do. The Overwatch player in me winces at the overwhelming complexity in her kit, even as someone who gravitates toward these kinds of heroes. It’s certainly fun to knock a Spider-Man away from my team or disappear my team’s Hulk as he rampages on the point, but it has me extremely curious if future supports will be as stacked as her.
Overwatch heroes tend to have a handful of abilities with multiple ways to use them. Ana’s healing grenade heals her, boosts healing on allies, and nullifies healing on enemies. It’s all packed into one versatile ability, which means misusing it can really hurt. Skill in Overwatch is about how good you are at cycling through those abilities and using them to make up for your weaknesses. Marvel Rivals seems to swing in the other direction and gives heroes so many abilities that it’s OK to ignore them sometimes. The Invisible Woman takes this to the extreme and is substantially more powerful than the other supports because of it. It’s possible she’s just over-tuned as one of the first new heroes to be added to the game, but I worry it’s a bar future supports won’t be able to meet, especially as players improve over time.
Despite the differences, Marvel Rivals is truly speedrunning Overwatch’s turbulent history of balance. Mister Fantastic, who joins the roster with the Invisible Woman, is a tank disguised as a damage dealer. Overwatch had this problem with Doomfist and turned him into a tank in the sequel. All it takes is a few more of these kinds of role-breaking heroes to threaten the goofy hero shooter vibe that Marvel Rivals is supposedly going for.
