The Fantastic Four have been in Marvel Rivals for a hot minute, but as Fantastic Four: First Steps enters theaters, the titular heroes have gotten a few new updates. They have skins based on their movie counterparts, and now there’s a new team-up ability for the Human Torch and the Thing. If you’ve seen the movie, you know there’s a scene in which Johnny Storm flies Ben Grimm over New York City and sends him barreling into an enemy with fire-powered momentum. Well, Marvel Rivals lets you and a friend reenact this maneuver in the hero shooter, and while it has some strategic advantages, some Human Torch players have decided instead to use it to troll their Thing-playing friends.
In a team-based shooter like Marvel Rivals, a bad play can put your team at risk. These games are built around coordinating and executing cooperative plays, and Rivals’ team-up abilities are one of the more codified ways the game bakes coordination into a match. If you and a teammate both pick specific characters who, together, unlock special abilities, you also open up new strategies. The Human Torch/Thing team-up lets Johnny pick up Ben and then send him into a group of enemies to wreak havoc on them and gain control of an objective. However, not all of the applications of this move are strategic, as it also gives the Human Torch player complete control over the duo while they’re in the air. This means that if you’re playing as the Thing and your flying friend isn’t trustworthy, they can just drop you off the side of the map.
Dropping someone off the map is one thing, but even if you have a Human Torch player who isn’t going to send you falling into a chasm, if they don’t have great game sense, they might throw Ben into a scrap he can’t win. So you’re putting your life in your teammate’s hands with this one. It’s not too dissimilar to how, when Lifeweaver was added to Overwatch 2, some players trolled their teammates by using his Life Grip ability to pull them off the map. Hopefully, this self-sabotaging behavior doesn’t last too long, or is at least kept between duos who know each other and can scream into each other’s voice chat while the rest of us blissfully go about our objective-capturing lives.
Fantastic Four: First Steps is in theaters now. It’s fine.