Review: “Marvel Rivals” New Doom Match Game Mode is a Quick and Fun Way to Test Your Skills

Are you ready to take on Marvel heroes and villains all on your own?

Marvel Rivals first season Eternal Night Falls is out now. In addition to some amazing new characters, cosmetics, and maps, a new game mode titled Doom Match has arrived for this season.

Marvel Rivals, Marvel Games and NetEase Games’ massive new Player v Player game has launched a brand new game mode as a part of their first official season. The new season, titled Eternal Night Falls, continues the game’s main story line that brought the character’s together.

After the Timestream Entanglement swept through the metropolitan area, Doctor Strange became lost in the Entangled Astral Plane. Saved by Scarlet Witch, he returns to find that multiple pages of the Darkhold have gone missing. Dracula and Doctor Doom have teamed up to stop the moon with the power of the Chronovium. Now with darkness overtaking New York, Dracula and his legion of vampires have overrun the city. It’s now up to the heroes to find a solution to save the city from collapse.

Part of that story brings us into a new free-for-all game mode titled Doom Match. Joining a match with 8 to 12 players, each participant is out for themselves. Each player is aiming to grab 16 kills before anyone else, however, you don’t need to be the top player to win. Each game, the top 50% of scoring players will receive a victory, with MVP going to the player who grabbed their 16th kill. Let’s check it out.  

When you go to the “Play” tab on the game’s homescreen, you’ll need to change the game mode to Doom Match before you press start. Finding matches was quick, usually taking less than 10 seconds to match me in a game. Once matched, you’ll head to a Sanctum Sanctorum character selection screen featuring Bats, Doctor Strange’s ghost dog. You won’t have a lot of time to pick a character, so make sure you’re ready to choose your Marvel hero or villain before selecting play.

For my first few matches I went with Storm.

Loading into the game, you’ll be taken to the Sanctum Sanctorum map, which features a ton of portals to experience New York both in and out of Doctor Strange’s residence.

Once you begin exploring and looking for players to take out, you’ll notice this map has a ton of different levels, making it important to be aware of your surroundings. While there are many open areas where large fights between multiple players will unfold, there are also plenty of hallways and portals to escape through when you are low on health.

When you press tab in this game mode, you’ll see yourself stacked in order of most to least kills, with the game registering the top 6 as one team and bottom 6 as another. You’ll wanna keep an eye on that to make sure you are dealing enough damage to capture a victory. While playing my first match as Storm, I found that this maze of a map isn’t conducive to certain attacks, movement abilities, and Ultimates. For Storm, her drawbacks were definitely her movement, making it difficult to quickly get away when indoors. However, her ranged attacks were great at firing into multiplayer fights to capture some kills. Her Ultimate was also great for taking out multiple players.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t having a lot of luck with Storm and decided to team up with Spider-Man instead. While I figured having powerful short range attacks would help me take down enemies, it was very hard to swing out of the way of enemy attacks while indoors. After playing a few rounds, and continuously losing, I decided it was time to try out a different character. I went through a few matches as Squirrel Girl as well, which was actually a really fun character to use in Doom Match, but I was still just barely losing and needed to prove to myself that I could pull a win.

One of the two newly released characters for Marvel Rivals, Mister Fantastic was my next choice. I had not yet had the chance to play with the character yet, so this was a bit of a gamble, but, quickly, I learned why everyone has been using him.

He’s, admittedly, a tad overpowered, with incredible ranged punches stretching across rooms, a last resort damage absorbing move, and a few other special attacks. Punching players through portals was so much fun with Mister Fantastic, and I was excited about how intuitive he is to use.

After a pretty successful round, I had finally made the top 6, pulling out my first victory from more games than I wish to admit.

After getting my chance to check out Doom Match, I’m actually really enthralled with the new game mode. While it isn’t as structured or strategic as a normal Quick Match, Doom Match gives players the chance to test their skills without worrying about dragging their team down. I think it's great for players looking to login for a shorter amount of time, with Doom Matches lasting a noticeably less time to complete. If I’m playing with friends, Quick Match is probably where I’ll head to first, but I will absolutely be playing Doom Match during this season of Marvel Rivals. I also think it's a great place to competitively try out new characters or even just get better with heroes/villains that you aren’t as comfortable teaming up with. It is great to see such a new game already investing in interesting and varying content so early into its life, with Doom Match being the second special game mode already released. I highly recommend you check out the new Doom Match mode on Marvel Rivals.

Marvel Rivals is a free-to-play PvP game from Marvel Games and NetEase Games, available now on PC and major gaming consoles.

Read More Marvel:

Maxon Faber
Based in Los Angeles, California, Maxon is roller coaster and musical theatre nerd. His favorite dinosaur is the parasaurolophus, specifically the one in Jurassic World: The Ride.