Despite aggressive monetization and about 17 layers of inscrutable progression systems, Marvel Future Revolution is a pretty OK mobile MMO. The story is fairly compelling, the cutscenes are frequent and high-quality, the animations look great, and most importantly, you can play eight different Marvel heroes, including Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, and Captain Marvel. It’s not necessarily going to check all of the FF14 or WoW boxes if you’re a big MMORPG player, but as far as mobile games go, let’s just say you could do a lot worse. Even compared to other Marvel mobile games – including the other one with Future in the title – Future Revolution actually has fascinating gameplay and, dare I say, potential.
Despite my icky feelings about the kind of game that has more than five different categories of boosters, loot boxes, random draws, and crafting materials to buy – Future Revolution has 11 – I’ve still put a fair few hours into the game because, frankly, my brain is made of mush and sometimes I just want to turn in a bunch of quests and get some pants. My biggest problem with this game isn’t the microtransactions, it’s the auto-play feature. They’ve made this game so easy to play without actually playing it that I’m left wondering why I play it at all. I’m not sure what I get out of letting a video game play itself, and the fact that I keep doing it anyway kind of scares me. It’s making me question my relationship with gaming in general, and not in a good way.
Future Revolution can play itself. When you press the auto-play button at the bottom of the screen, your character will immediately head towards the next objective, talk to NPCs, fight enemies, and interact with objects. They’ll use all of their abilities and even top off their health with a potion if they get low. The game recommends that you turn off auto-play for the instanced boss encounters, but I’ve had it running for four days and have never had to turn it off once.
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While Future Revolution is perfectly capable of playing without you, there are a few things it won’t do. Your character will never turn in a quest or choose a new one to start. Missions are pretty short, so at the very least you’ll need to tap on the screen to turn quests in every couple of minutes. What’s more, dialogue is only voice-acted for the first sentence of every NPC encounter, so if you’re trying to keep track of the story, you’ll need to actively watch the screen. You also won’t auto-equip gear, so unless you're tapping on the screen every time a new piece of armor drops, you’ll need to occasionally go into your inventory and equip everything you’ve collected or risk being underpowered.
You can’t simply hit auto-play and walk away. You have to babysit the game even when you’re not actively playing it, and if you care about the story, you have to watch it the whole time. You’re not playing, but you still have to be engaged, so I wonder… What's the point?
Games that use auto-play like this indicate they have such an unreasonable grind that you must be playing even while you’re busy doing other things if you’re to have any hope of progressing. The auto-play usually isn’t good enough for high-level content where things like dodging and combos are important, but that’s also where microtransactions become almost mandatory for progression. If Future Revolution works like other Netmarble games, the moment auto-play becomes useless is the moment you’ll need to start spending money to keep up.
I’m sitting here writing while my phone sits off to the side playing Future Revolution automatically. Every few seconds my eyes dart over to the screen to make sure I haven’t missed my cue to turn in a quest or any important story beats. If this isn’t the intended use for auto-play, I really don’t know what is. The only thing I’m getting out of this experience is the tiny hit of dopamine when Doctor Strange levels up. I’m not making choices about gear or improving my skills as a player. It’s just “number go up” in its purest, most distilled form, and I don’t think it's good for me.
Whenever I’ve complained about this before, someone has inevitably told me I can turn it off if I don’t like it. I can’t tell you how much you’re missing the point if you think not using it is a solution. Auto-play is not a feature for convenience or lower difficulty setting, it's a mechanic built into the foundation of the game. It’s fixed into the on-screen UI for a reason, and it’s meant to be used. Ignoring mechanics is not a reasonable way to improve the quality of a game. If I turned it off and used my hands to play, I would just be thinking about how I could level more efficiently and multitask if it was set to auto-play. There’s a reason we exploit things like the Destiny loot cave and the rare candy glitch in Pokemon. Doing anything less than the fastest way is a waste of our time, and if Future Revolution has an auto-play function, people are going to use it.
Compulsive gaming is a very real problem for a lot of people. I’ve struggled with problematic gaming during a few periods in my life, and I can see how something like Future Revolution could potentially cause some issues for people like me. It’s easy for me to put a game down when it's time to work, socialize, or practice self-care, but when the game can be played this passively, it can become really hard to turn off. Because I can play Future Revolution while I’m doing almost anything else, it feels like I’m losing progress anytime I’m not playing, including right now.
I’ll probably uninstall Future Revolution soon, despite my love for Marvel and the things I genuinely like about the game. I don’t know how anyone can have a healthy relationship with a game like this unless they truly just launch the game, punch guys for a while, and then turn it off and stop thinking about it. That’s not how the developers would like you to play though. It's very much designed to keep you logged in for as long as possible. The daily log-in rewards are broken up into ten-minute chunks for heaven’s sake. If that’s not a sign that the game is trying to take more from you than what it’s offering, I don’t know what is.
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