After seeing the superhero movie Io9 lauded as “perfectly competent” on Thursday night, I felt the urge to get a little more hands-on with Ant-Man. Luckily he’s now in every Marvel video game, including Diablo-esque Marvel Heroes.
The powerful Marvel Movie-Verse Engine extends far beyond the silver screen, with a horde of PC, mobile and console games ready with movie tie-in content on day one. We’ve played the Ant-Man pinball table for Pinball FX 2 and Zen Pinball 2. He’s shown up in Marvel Puzzle Quest, Marvel Future Fight, Marvel Contest of Champions, et cetera.
And of course he’s in Gazillion’s free-to-play PC MMO Marvel Heroes 2015, and he’s pretty great.
Gazillion generally does a pretty solid job of capturing superhero and villain powers given the limited scope of their game (no real flying, ground based combat, a flat plane), and Ant-Man feels like one of their better attempts. We’ve got a horde of insects following Scott Lang around everywhere he goes. He shrinks, he bounces from enemy to enemy, he makes fists out of ants and punches people. For someone with a childhood fear of ant swarms it’s pretty terrifying.
But still cool.
Ant-Man’s powers are derived from the three different incarnations of the character, and while Scott Lang is the default voice, a Hank Pym costume can be purchased from the in-game store, the additional price helping offset the price of hiring a completely different voice actor for the same character.
Here’s a video of Ant-Man in action, with commentary by yours truly. Apologies if the audio goes a little out of sync—I was trying a new recording method that I shall never use again.
As for the movie, it was a good time. Not a particularly memorable time, but I distinctly remember it being good.