By now, you’ve probably seen the trailer forMarvel 1943: Rise of Hydra. Itshows Captain America and Black Panther in the midst of the Second World War, as uneasy allies united by a common enemy but with deep differences between the pair. It looks incredible, and that’s probably why you’ve seen it. People can scarcely believe the trailer is even a video game - it looks indistinguishable from real life. We’ve beensaying that for a while in gaming(see - every instalment and remaster ofThe Last of Us), but this time we really mean it. Rise of Hydra looks fantastic. But in another way, maybe it doesn’t.
This is not just contrarian clickbait. It takes a lot to amaze me when it comes to video game graphics, but Rise of Hydra is bona fide mindblowing. The first clip I saw, I thought it was a live-action commercial, not in-engine footage. Technically, this game is a marvel, with a lowercase ’m'. Butas my colleague Tessa Kaur wrote about recently, it’s just a little hard to care sometimes.Dragon’s Dogma 2uses live-action FMVs for its cooking rather than rendering a real steak (although I guess the chef did render it - wordplay), because that’s much cheaper. As games get indistinguishable from reality, why not just use reality? It savedCapcoma lot of money, becamea positive viral talking point, and player experience is not impacted.
Photorealism Has Never Been So Close
So let’s go back to Rise of Hydra. Obviously you can’t just ‘use reality’ for a video game as easily as you can a sizzling steak, and we need to put a pin in the fact we haven’t seen any Rise of Hydra gameplay yet, just cinematics. Once you get over the fact it looks like real life, it doesn’t feel like it looks like much of anything. The costumes just look likeMCUversions with little flair elsewhere, and the game doesn’t have much in the way of tone either. A lot of the scenes are at night, which gives them a slice of atmosphere, but once you get over the photorealism, there’s little to be impressed by.
If your aim is to make things look as real as possible, then it’s hard to be deliberate in your artistic presentation. Things just look like how they look like. This doesn’t mean I think Rise of Hydra looks, or will be, bad. I just feel nothing. It’s impressive, but in the same way a cat being able to balance ten dice on its paw is impressive (that’s a real world record, by the way). Pointlessly impressive. Let me put it this way - ifMarvel’s Avengerslooked this good, would that make you like it more?Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice Leaguegets pretty close to this level even during gameplay, but that can’t save it.
Real Is Not The Same As Good
When I think of ‘best looking’ video games, I don’t usually consider how ‘realistic’ they are. A bold visual identity, like that found inThe Wind Waker, The Artful Escape, Okami, orPersona, is usually far more effective. An aesthetic with a purpose, even if a little janky, is more interesting that the perfection of a bland photograph.
Realism doesn’t mean you can’t have an artstyle -Deathloopspecifically evokes a ’70s coolness to highlight the aesthetics of its gadgets and gizmos, whileGhost of Tsushimaleans into Asian cinema (including its heavy-handed Kurosawa mode) despite being one of the best examples of thePS4’scapabilities. And as this technology gets cheaper and easier to deal with, we might see more realism more often, blended with a specific visual language aimed at channelling a theme.
We see this in the MCU too - Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Werewolf at Midnight both use unique visual approaches, while The Winter Soldier uses lighting and cinematography to channel Cold War political thrillers. Most others, vibrant and explosive as they may be, all look kind of the same. They’re expensive and impressive, but they’re a cat with dice on its paw. I hope Rise of Hydra is more than that.
I don’t mean to rain on the parade. This game looks excellent, and that’s an achievement that should not be minimised. But I hope this is not as gaming gets. Though less technically impressive, we’ve had games that looked ‘as good’ as this for 20 years, just not as real. I hope we keep picking good over real, even when real is closer than ever before.
Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra
Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra is a 2025 action-adventure game from Amy Hennig and the team at Skydance New Media. Set in the height of World War 2, you’ll play as four characters, including Captain America.
