Review of Captain America and the Avengers Beat’em Up

Super Heroes and Beat’em Up games go well together. Playing as your favorite comic book character and punching bad guys in the face is always fun. In this game, it is robots, but they still have faces, so it counts.

Captain America and the Avengers is a Beat’em Up game where you play as one of the Avengers. It is much better than the NES version, which was a standard platformer. It is also nice that you can play more than two Avengers in this game.

This is a port of an arcade game. It is one of the few Marvel arcade games that got a console port, and it feels odd that Marvel farmed out their properties to different companies. Capcom, Konami, Sega, and now Data East had a chance to use various Marvel superheroes in Beat’em Up games.

TLDR: A Great Port of a Largely Forgotten Arcade Game.

Narrative

We have a story for this game! This has been a rarity with the recent games I’ve reviewed. In Captain America and the Avengers, you have to defeat the Red Skull. Before you get to him, there are a bunch of lesser-known villains that make up the mini-bosses.

There is a bit of confusion with the story. I understand what they were trying to say, but it is a little odd. At first, we are told that the Red Skull used his wealth to gather the villains to his side, and then we get told he is using mind control.

I’m guessing they were trying to say that he used his money to buy or build mind-control technology, but that wasn’t very clear. The game suffers from a terrible translation. It is rather comical but not as funny as Simon’s Quest.

Near the end of the game, you learn that the Red Skull is building a laser. It is a super laser that will do something, and it can apparently destroy the planet. I have no idea why he would want to do that.

At the beginning of the game, you hear that the Red Skull has gathered other villains through either money or mind control. It makes sense for some of them, but then you get to Ultron. I’m not sure how Red Skull got him on his side, but whatever, it is a comic book game.

Overall, the story is fine. It is what you might expect from a comic book story. It fits in with the stories of the other Marvel Beat’em Up games.

Gameplay

Captain America and the Avengers is a standard Beat’em Up that tries to include a few Shoot’em Up stages. These are fine, but they aren’t done as well with your sprite being huge and slow. I wish they had stuck to a Beat’em Up instead of including these stages.

The game alternates between these shooter stages with Beat’em Ups. It is interesting to see how the game makes this work. Two of the characters, Iron Man and Vision, can fly. The other two, Captain America and Hawkeye, cannot fly, so the game has to create a way for them to be playable in these sections.

While it is fun to see these little cut scenes, it makes me wonder why Wonderman isn’t helping you fight the bad guys. He is there to deliver vehicles and then fucks off to where ever he was before. I find it funny, but that probably wasn’t the intention.

There are a few Avengers for you to choose from. It isn’t the entire cast because of the group’s many changes, but you have some of the most recognizable members. Here is the list:

• Captain America
• The Vision
• Iron Man
• Hawkeye

Vision and Iron Man are my favorite to play. Their jump attacks are more effective than Captain America and Hawkeye and seem to do more damage. Hawkeye is my least favorite character in the game.

He has his bow but doesn’t use it to, you know, shoot arrows. At least not in the Beat’em Up stages; he does use it in the shooter stages because it would be idiotic if he didn’t. He feels like a terrible copy of Captain America in this game.

What I found odd was the lack of a superattack. If there is one in the game, I wasn’t able to find it. There are two attack buttons, but I didn’t notice a difference. I figured I was probably doing something wrong, so I checked the manual.

After looking this up, I found a superattack in the game. You need to press both attack buttons at the same time. It isn’t worth it.

There are a few power-ups in the game. I use the term power-ups lightly because they act like healing items. Here they are:

• Big Life Disk – Some little bastard will run across the screen on Beat’em Up stages and drop this in an inconvenient place. It heals you.
• Small Life Disk – I’ve only seen these in the Shoot’em Up stages. A lot of them get dropped in each of these stages.
• Wasp – I’ve only seen this in the Shoot’em Up stages, and it feels like a slap in the face to The Wasp. When you pick this up, Wasp appears and acts like a weapons pod from R-Type or Gradius.

This is probably a good time to talk about your character’s health. Unlike other Beat’em Ups, you don’t have a life bar. Instead, you’re given a set number of hit points. I like this a little more because it makes the game feel a little like an Action RPG.

There are five stages and a total of 14 bosses. These range from recognizable enemies like Ultron, Red Skill, and Juggernaut to somewhat more obscure enemies like Grim Reaper, Living Laser, and Whirlwind. Games like this were how I found out about different characters back in the early 90s.

Overall, this is an enjoyable game! I wish it were on one of my Arcade 1up cabinets, but the Data East one I have wouldn’t be a good fit for it. It would be cool if they could get the four Marvel Beat’em Ups on one cabinet, but that would probably be a nightmare.

Visuals

The game looks fantastic! It was released in 1992 and looks very good for the time. The characters look good, with a few exceptions, and the backgrounds look great!

While most of the characters look great, there are some issues with a few of the villains. Before I looked up who they were, I had no idea that the Mandarin and Juggernaut were in the game. I also thought the giant robot was supposed to be a Sentinel from the X-Men.

Several of the villains look like generic enemies from previous stages. Data East might have reused the sprites and added some graphics, but I had a hard time figuring out who they were. Take the first mini-bosses in the game.

You fight Klaw and the Living Laser early in the game. They don’t identify themselves and don’t look like anything special. You would only know they’re important by seeing the life bars at the bottom of the screen. You would have to either know or want to know who they’re supposed to be.

Other characters, like the four Avengers, Red Skull, Ultron, and Grim Reaper, are easy to identify. More obscure characters might be identifiable to people who read Avengers comics or the individual character’s comics, but for someone like me, I wouldn’t have known them at the time the game was released.

The backgrounds for the levels look great! Each location looks unique and has a lot of detail. It would’ve been nice if they had unique enemies, but that might have been too much for a licensed game.

Overall, the graphics are very good! There are issues with some of the enemy boss characters, but those don’t matter all that much. All you need to do is beat the crap out of the bad guys until the credits roll!

8/10. This was a ton of fun to play! Superhero Beat’em Ups are wonderful games, especially when they are faithfully ported to the home console. I like this one more than The Punisher Beat’em Up.

Pros

• Great Graphics
• Good Gameplay
• Great Multiplayer Game

Cons

• Short (30-45 minutes)
• Can be Repetitive

Conclusion

I was pleasantly surprised with this game. It makes me wonder why other Beat’em Ups like Sega’s Spider-Man or Konami’s X-Men weren’t brought to the SNES and Genesis/Mega Drive. There were a number of odd decisions back then when it came to popular arcade games.

I love finding games like this and learning more about them. I had no idea this was in the arcades; now I want to try out the arcade version. These games bring back memories of playing arcade games at a roller rink, Pizza Huts, and Chuck-e Cheese restaurants.

There wasn’t a dedicated arcade near me, so playing these games on the home console was my main option. I also had to either know about the games or have a friend who knew about them; sometimes, that gets lost on the internet.

Not everyone had subscriptions to every gaming magazine, access to an arcade, or a rich friend who had every console. People like me had to get lucky and stumble into these games or have a desire to find them later on in life.