Avengers Academy is Marvel’s latest mobile game and this time the massive company has employed TinyCo to bring the college experience to your favorite heroes and villains.
TinyCo, best known for its Family Guy the Quest for Stuff city-building game, has taken the Marvel IP and created a new world where heroes like Iron Man and the Hulk are college students recruited by Nick Fury to make Avengers Academy the best University while saving the world.
“We cooperated with Marvel to reimagine the whole Marvel universe,” Jeremey Horn, General Manager of TinyCo., told iDigitalTimes. “We tried to mix the college experience with what it means to be a superhero.”
But if you think Avengers Academy is just another city-building game like The Quest for Stuff , you’d be wrong. As Horn told us, Avengers Academy is very different from how other games in the genre are played.
“The main difference is the style and the pacing of the game. Every time you get to unlock something you’ll have a cutscene that will stop the game and will tell you what’s happening in the city,” Horn said. “One example is a blimp from Hydra could be contaminating the city so you’ll have to send your heroes to stop it.”
However, if you think it’s a combat-based game like some of Marvel’s other mobile titles you’d be mistaken again. Horn elaborated saying Avengers Academy is not just about combat or battle but it’s about what you can make your heroes do in the school - like build a hot tub and have your heroes jump in.
“There’s hundreds of characters like Tigress and Hank Pym and you can train them up to become stronger, unlock new powers and these powers will allow you to beat all types of enemies like the Red Skull, Thanos, AIM and many many more,” Horn said.
Tigress and Hank Pym are included in Avengers Academy along with the initial roster of heroes and villains that were announced when the game was first announced. But Horn assures that more characters are coming.
“We wanted some of the most recognizable characters and a couple of ones we really love like Ms. Marvel [Kamala Khan], War Machine and Falcon but in the future we are already planning to release new characters that we know and love.”
All the different characters in Avengers Academy lead to another huge aspect to the game, and that is players can build relationships between characters.
“The biggest difference is now we are pushing the relationships between the characters to the maximum. You can send characters on dates, you can build friendships and those things will give you new items, new rewards and special costumes.”
The relationship aspect of Avengers Academy is definitely something new for Marvel games, and if it’s anything like the relationship system in Fire Emblem or Fallout, it could lead to some interesting perks in-game.
But as many comic book fans know, certain characters are naturally drawn to others after years on the page together. Will the relationships be set in Avengers Academy?
“We are trying to stay true to the characters, they are not exactly set but you’ll have a handful of characters who are going to be relatable to a character you want to get into a relationship,” Horn explained. “For example, spoiler alert, Iron Man really likes Black Widow.”
And Horn revealed that Black Widow and Iron Man will be getting special costumes for maximizing their relationship in-game. However, if you’re a fan of the Tony Stark/Pepper Potts pairing you may be disappointed. As Horn puts it, she’s a faculty member so she’s “off the books.”
“We really want to push all those relationship and see when players play the game, we want them to build a personal connection to the game.”
Avengers Academy will have more than just relationships within the school as Avengers Academy will have to deal with rival academies like AIM, Hydra and perhaps even some academies beyond Earth.
“The great thing is that we are not confined by the ‘play space’ but we’re extending to the whole world [of Avengers Academy] around it. We have enemy academies coming to you like Hydra that will threaten your success so you’ll have to train your heroes to fight back,” Horn said.
Players will recognize characters like Madame Hydra and a brainwashed Winter Soldier, just to name a few, as part of these rival academies who are as much a part of the main story of Avengers Academy as any upcoming updates.
“We are planning to do weekly updates and some of these updates are going to be really big events with major story arcs,” he said. “I can’t say anything but some of these events are so amazing, we can’t wait.”
Horn compared some of the storytelling in Avengers Academy, written by Allen Warner, to the recently completed Secret Wars event at Marvel Comics. The biggest reason he compares it to Secret Wars is because there will be a multiverse in Avengers Academy that you’ll be investigating.
While Horn was not at liberty to say too much about the multiverse in Avengers Academy, he did allude to it being connected to how you can connect with your friends in the game. He said “[TinyCo.] is going to deal with all of it in a brand new way, but everything is connected.”
“We are making a promise to players that this is a story that we are investing a lot of blood, tears, sweat and we’re not trying to make something that’s easy, we are making a story. And you’ll need to play to discover the details of the story,” Horn said. “We don’t want to make an easy game, we are trying to have players come back to the game to progress the story.”
Avengers Academy is now available for iOS and Android.
