MPQ vs Spiderman Unlimited

Straycat

I've been playing the endless runner Spiderman Unlimited (SMU) for a couple weeks and am enjoying it quite a bit. Similar to MPQ in a way, good base gameplay but with an addicting collecting/ leveling aspect. ISO 8 and small scenes of dialogue before a match also appear in both. Just felt like putting my thoughts down comparing the games.

Pro MPQ

1. Ads. Good lord is Spiderman full of ads. Before a match, at the end, and after you have an option to watch an ad for a bonus. Then returning to any previous screen a sale pops up anywhere from $1-$25 for some sort of bundle. Sometimes an ad will just start playing or takes up the bottom of the screen, but usually lets you x out of it. I know MPQ sometimes feels like a cash grab, but nothing like SMU.

2. Variants.  My roster says 66/369, so I guess there are 369 total characters. Obviously since SMU is only using the Spiderverse they are all variants, but you can have the same exact look across 3-4 tiers. And every character plays the same, just with different stat modifiers. Not sure how many copies there are, but I have gotten a 1-4 tier bagman, each looking identical. There are 7 tiers total.

3. Leveling. SMU has a pretty convoluted leveling system not helped by the fact it changed fairly dramatically since it started. I found most guides were obsolete since they were written when the game first came out. And in my 2 weeks with it they made another change to how they graded your roster strength.

4. Event progression. Just an example, an event today in SMU has progression at 2, 6, 14, 42, 200, 600. So reaching max progression is 3x the amount as the step before it. Kind of a tough grind without a consistent "5 clears per node" baseline

Pro SMU

1. Leveling. Characters can rank up according to their tier, 10 levels per star. Raising their rank raises their level cap, which is done with special resources that you can get by "synthesizing" characters. Basically instead of 1000 iso for a dupe you actually get important resources to upgrade your roster. And instead of iso to level them up you have to play them.

2. Special events. SMU has a lot of the things we speculate for MPQ. Alliance vs Alliance events, sending out characters when you aren't playing, daily goals, modes with different objectives

3.  Roster based strength. There is no scaling in SMU, but there are different modes, purchase options, etc unlocked as you progress. Instead of farming common characters for xp, you are graded on your best characters.

4. Story mode. There is an always available story mode running beside the daily/ weekly events. The story is not the prologue here, reaching the end of it requires a strong roster.

Overall
I was able to appreciate MPQ a little more after playing a different mobile Marvel game. Seems to have more depth here while I was able to progress pretty easily in the other.

Anyone else play this or other mobile games? What can MPQ learn from its competitors?

RemoDestroyer

I was playing it for a long time. Stopped maybe a year ago. It was fun but having no social aspect like alliances or line made it much easier to walk away from.

The best thing I remember was event reward multipliers based on what would be the equivalent of shield rank.

All those ads sound relatively new. I don't remember them from when I played.

I remember something like alliances but it didn't work well.

JarvisJackrabbit

My MPQ alliance is composed of current and former top SMU players (I was in the Canucks111 alliance on iOS). What I have enjoyed the most about MPQ in comparison is that it can be played without requiring my absolute attention. MPQ is a much more casual game, and that's a good thing. Alliance battleground events in SMU involved playing 30+ hours without sleep on occasion. It was ridiculous.

As you mentioned, there is very little variety among character abilities from a gameplay perspective. This was the other thing that most sold me on MPQ. Everyone is different. That was a huge breath of fresh air.

Gameloft's Customer Care representatives are just the worst. Gameloft's pop-up ads are the worst. Selling reskins of tired characters is dirty and expensive. I have played SMU more than any other game in my life and I only play casually now with some of the great friends I made there. I can't fathom how anyone just starting out in that game could make any meaningful progress without spending literally a million dollars on top of having fleet thumbs and reflexes.

Every time I start to lament how many characters there are in MPQ, I remember that SMU will have 400 of them soon and our situation with this little candy crusher doesn't seem too bad anymore.

Rhipf

Hello Jarvis (a fellow SMU alum name that I recognize).

I have mostly stopped playing SMU as well (do pop in for occasional runs still). The game is very different from the game I started playing (and not for the better). When I started the game was actually quite fun to play now it is too much of a grind and Gameloft (the developers) seem more interested in how they can make money (via In App Purchase) than actually making the game fun. If you find SMU enjoyable as it is now then more power to you. Unfortunately I have played it long enough to remember how good the game could be.

I find MPQ much better in the way character progression is handled. It may not be any faster than SMU but at least in MPQ I always feel like I am making forward progress.

Actual game play is hard to compare between the two games since they are very different games.

The pop-up ads in SMU have gotten totally out of control. As OP stated they show up at the beginning of runs, end of runs, (fortunately not middle of runs - yet), when you go to an event screen, etc. Also, most of the IAP are just way over priced ($15+ just for a character card is CRAZY).

zodiac339

Yeah, SMU is absolutely clogged with unnecessary amounts of variants. If you could focus on only having the highest rank of a particular character, it might not be so bad, but then the multipliers that make competing even slightly possible required a specific character of a specific rank. Nope. Roster way, way to big to be scolling endlessly through three to four different ranks of the same character with not even the kind of variety you see between the 2* and 3* versions of Thor or Human Torch. Not even sure how long ago I stopped playing SMU, but I don’t really miss it.