‘Marvel Cosmic Invasion’ Is An All-New Retro-Style Beat ‘Em Up
Look at the glorious pixel art
Recently during one of Nintendo’s Direct presentations, a new pixel art beat ‘em up was revealed for later this year named Marvel Cosmic Invasion and it’s coming to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox consoles, and PC. This new game features many of Marvel’s most iconic characters like Captain America, Spider-Man, Wolverine, Storm, and more in solo or cooperative battles against bad guys.
I absolutely love a good pixel art beat ‘em up game. Dating all the way back to the original Nintendo console (NES), Sega Genesis, and Super Nintendo (SNES), I’ve been playing beat ‘em ups like Double Dragon, Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and more for a very long time. Naturally, the state of the genre has me very happy these days.
Marvel Cosmic Invasion—Coming 2025
Marvel Cosmic Invasion will include 15 different heroes to choose from as you create a duo to take into each level that can be swapped between as a tag team mid-fight, potentially inspired by the character-switching from the Marvel vs. Capcom fighting games. Similar to other popular beat ‘em ups, Marvel Cosmic Invasion will feature four-player drop-in/drop-out local and online co-op multiplayer with full crossplay between all platforms.
Did you know this isn’t the first Marvel-themed pixel art beat ‘em up game? That’s right, back in the early 90s Marvel licensed the characters to Data East to make an arcade game featuring Marvel characters called Captain America and the Avengers. In that game, you can only play as Captain America, Iron Man, Vision, and Hawkeye. Eventually, it was also ported to home consoles like the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo—in fact, I’ve got a complete copy of the game on Sega Genesis. You can see it in action here.
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Circling back to the four properties I mentioned at the beginning, all of them are more relevant today than they have been in many years. Double Dragon just got a new game recently with another on the way, Streets of Rage had a recent sequel with Streets of Rage 4, Golden Axe is in the process of being rebooted by Sega themselves, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge was a recently released pixel art beat ‘em up in this same style by the exact same developer (Tribute Games) and publisher (Dotemu) as Marvel Cosmic Invasion.
That’s a powerful lineup
Fans of beat ‘em ups like me are spoiled for choice at the moment and it’s about to get even better. Moving from left to right while fighting bad guys has never been cooler or more in style. Marvel Cosmic Invasion is planned for release later this year.