The Siege of Castle Doom” is badass but also needs refinement – SmashPad

Okay, so if I could sum up this mode with one picture, it would be this: 

Just be aware, I have MANY Dr. Doom comic panels I will be using in this review. Dr. Doom is one of the all-time greats, and you will know that by the end of this review. 

The second DLC for Marvel Cosmic Invasion is a pretty big departure from the first DLC or the DLC that we’ve come to expect from Dotrmu and Tribute Games, as this isn’t just two new characters or anything like that. We do get new characters in the form of Sue Storm (The Invisible Woman) and Dr. Doom (aka Uncle Doom to Valeria), but also a roguelite mode where you fight your way through Doom’s castle to take him on at the end. 

On its face, the mode is exactly what you’d expect from a comic book: a band of heroes comes together to reach Dr. Doom and stop him. Conceptually, this is AWESOME. Why are we stopping Dr. Doom? It doesn’t matter. Doom does as he pleases. 

Siege of Castle Doom has a lot of depth, but in the form I played, it’s extremely over-tuned, and I could see it pushing away most of the people who would be purchasing it, except the hardcore who have mastered Marvel Cosmic Invasion’s combat system in the way that people master fighting games.

In other words, the game expects you to be this dude: 

And not this one: 

So here’s how a run works. You pick your characters like in the regular game, and you’re thrown into Doom’s castle. Each path through the castle has various doors you can pick after dispatching enemies, and each door leads to a different challenge with a different reward. There’s some strategy in the doors you pick, and those choices alter the path of the run.

For example, let’s say you’re getting beat on and you take a Heart door, which will heal you, but that means you lose out on possibly getting defensive or attack power-ups that could help you in your run. Other doors are in the mix, like Infinity doors, which basically give you unlimited focus so you can keep spamming your ultimate ability over and over and wreck enemies. You’ll find that fun because the enemies in this mode can be VERY tough. From the jump, you’ll fight shielded enemies, new enemies like doom bots, and various combinations the normal game doesn’t throw at you, plus some new varieties that aren’t in the normal game. Killing these enemies will give you battery drops that fill a stabilizer gauge. Each full stabilizer gauge gives you a perk, and once you fill three stabilizers, you get to move to the next zone. The castle has three zones, so you’ll need to do this three times to fight Dr. Doom, because you don’t get to fight a doctor without going through some shit. 

To counter this, there’s a gauge that also fills: the Siege gauge. This is something that fills as you take punishment and die. The more it fills, the harder the enemies get, and once it fills entirely, the run is over. 

To add variety, you can pick up equipment during the levels to change how you play. These pickups, like the doors, are designed to create variations in each run. These variations multiply and mutate based on how many people are playing, and the depth of what COULD be done in this mode seems pretty infinite. 

In the middle of all this, you can run into events called Skirmish Echos, which bring back bosses from the main games.  These enemies can be much tougher than they were in the main games due to the Siege gauge modifier, and even push-over bosses can throw you a beating if you aren’t careful. 

If that wasn’t enough variety, the team also added level modifiers. You can encounter modifiers like the Blizzard modifier, which requires you to punch a heater that creates a circle you can stand in, kind of like an area of effect. If the heater/furnace goes out, you’ll start taking damage, freeze, and die. So you’ll end up juggling hitting this furnace, having your mobility limited by staying in the area of effect, and fighting enemies. It can get extremely intense as you go further into your run and run into some very frustrating enemies. 

My understanding is that the team added literally hundreds of handcrafted encounters behind each door type so each run would feel different. In the time I had with the game, I never had a run end the same way twice, and while the enemies didn’t repeat, they had a type. Meaning brute-style enemies, shield enemies, and TONS of flying enemies. Speaking of flying enemies, they now have markers underneath them so you can more easily identify where they are on the screen and hit them more easily. It’s a welcome addition, especially when you go online and things get hectic. 

After each run, whether you beat Dr. Doom or not, you earn currency to permanently unlock specific modifiers that can, hopefully, make the next run a bit easier in Reed’s Lab, playing into the Fantastic Four theme that permeates this mode. And let’s be real here, you aren’t going to beat Dr. Doom on the first try or the first 10 tries? Why? Cause you’re a peasant. That’s why. 

There’s a lot to explore in this mode, but as I mentioned earlier, it feels heavily overtuned. The mode itself is hard from the first encounter in both solo and multiplayer, and with the time I played, the perks you can earn don’t really make up for the difficulty. Further, it feels like the siege gauge works backward: the more you struggle, the harder the game gets. I watched a video with the developers playing, and they got beat on, which empowered the mid-run boss they fought. I’m not a fan of the devs basically putting their thumb on the scale if you’re doing poorly. It feels like constantly getting blue-shelled in Mario Kart even when you’re in last place. I’m not sure what the point is, but it’s one reason the mode feels so overtuned. This entire concept, in turn, makes each reward you can earn through Reed’s lab feel like a reprieve rather than a reward because it feels like this mode treats its difficulty as its value rather than the sheer variety that’s available here. What would have been better is an easier first zone, a gauge that rises much slower early in a run, and unlocks that make a bigger difference, even if they take a while longer to earn. 

So all this brings me to the question of who this mode and DLC is even for. Based on my experience, this mode is for hardcore players who’ve mastered the base game. That means a small group of people is going to absolutely LOVE it, while the general public will most likely bounce off it after a few runs unless there are serious balance adjustments. And that’s a real shame because there is a lot of depth here when you mix the perks you can get during a run, equipment you can level up, and the different types of characters you can use in a run, ESPECIALLY in co-op. Coordinating builds and team dynamics in co-op mode can feel like drafting your own special version of the Avengers, which is legit awesome, but to realize its potential, it really needs a serious balance pass.

With all that said, I am excited to see what they can and will do with this mode after, and with their beat-em-ups in the future, because modes like this can add a LOT of replay value as long as the combat mechanics are solid, and Marvel Cosmic Invasion has absolutely rock-solid mechanics. 

Also, you get to play as Dr. Doom. And despite being one of the baddest villains of all time, Doom knows it’s important to eat ice cream and get a good night’s sleep.

What else could you really want? If you’re Dr. Doom, you’ll probably find all of it, beneath you. But you should still go buy this, cause there’s a lot of potential here.