My jaw hit the floor when a recent Marvel Rivals match began and half of my team immediately died. Seconds ago they’d been standing beside me, tagging the walls and emoting to pass the time. Now they were ragdolls flailing off a cliff.
They’d been Doctor Strange’d, I soon realized. Marvel Rivals’ 33-hero launch roster is full of quirky abilities with unexpected use cases, but none pack as much comedic potential as Doctor Strange’s “Pentagram of Farallah” portal spell.
Similar to Overwatch’s Symmetra, Strange’s portal lets him establish an entrance and exit point useful for instantly ferrying your squad into a flanking position or straight onto an objective. Unlike Symmetra’s portal, which is essentially a solid blue oval that zaps you from one point to another, Strange’s portal is an actual portal—you can see, shoot, or walk straight through it like in Valve’s Portal games. It’s a really neat visual effect, and one of the most “next-gen” gimmicks in Rivals (you can tell because the portal tanks everyone’s framerate while it’s up), but that gimmick is also what sent my team to an early grave.
Strange can place his portals pretty much anywhere, so clever mains have started to place one portal at the enemy spawn door and the other at the edge of a cliff. If they’re especially devious, they’ll even try to align the view point on the cliff side so that it looks like solid ground from the other side. It’s not a perfect trick—it’s obvious there’s a portal outside spawn if you’re paying attention, but it is a solid buffoon trap. Go on autopilot when the match starts and you might not notice the orange ring of the portal or the mismatched landscape on the other side. One step too far and you’re already gone.
What a solid gag. For how much can (and should) be said about Marvel Rivals’ wonky balance, arbitrary seasonal buffs, and overly chaotic fights, NetEase got one aspect of a hero shooter very right: Playful, flexible abilities that make players want to experiment and discover what’s possible.
First thing I see in my Silver Promote Game. from r/marvelrivals
Another recent innovation in tricky murder: Jeff the Land Shark has gone from adorable little healer to team-wiping menace in a matter of days because players figured out you can eat the entire enemy team with his ult and spit them over a ledge.