Marvel Strike Force is a free-to-play 5v5 non-tactical combat game using Marvel heroes and villains.

The plot is that Ultimus is taking over various universes, mind controlling their heroes and villains into his army. The heroes and villains of our Earth must join forces to stop Ultimus. This plot both explains why you can mix any hero and villain into your team and why you can fight duplicates (you never have duplicates in your stable, instead you can rank up your characters).

The main activity is 5v5 combat between your team and the campaign scenario or other players. In each turn you can tell your character who to attack and what power to use (everyone starts with two actions and as they level they get up to four actions). Or you can do auto battle which still allows you to choose the target and is about 80% as effective (but otherwise fights are slow and there are many so without auto battle it's very tedious).

The various activity sections:

• Campaigns are a sequence of scenarios per chapter with a storyline. Chapters are gated to your character level and perhaps team composition (i.e. Villains campaign you can only use villain characters). Campaigns use energy which regenerates at 1 per 5 min, about 5 to 6 hours to fully recharge which seems typical for FTP.
• Challenges are much like campaigns but they open for a day or two each week and you get 3 tokens to use but progress is tracked.
• Arena is PvP combat
• Events are like campaigns but limited time and much more restrictive of what characters you can use (which promotes having a large stable and upgrading everyone in your stable).
• Blitz is also PvP like Arena
• Raids are alliance (e.g. clan) activities. A raid has different branches and you do combat in each branch to get to and defeat the boss of each branch. A player can only do one branch and enemy damage sticks so you need your clan players to spread out and/or they can team up on a branch.

Besides Challenges, Events, and Campaigns which can gate on team composition, promoting getting and upgrading all characters, there are characters that can bring other characters into a combat as reinforcements. Maria Hill, who is a slightly below average combat character, can bring in my SHIELD Medic or SHIELD Trooper, both of which are below average but still welcome reinforcements. So even below average characters are useful (and I mean below average when upgraded to the same level/skill/equipment/rank as an average character).

As you do activities you can rewards, different activities have different rewards:

• Experience which levels up your commander. Commander level is both a gate to certain activities and caps the maximum character level.
• Materials used to equip your characters either directly or by combining materials.
• Character shards which are used to recruit new characters or rank up characters. Recruiting takes 15 or more shards and ranking up is progressively more shards so there's always a reason to collect shards.
• Orbs which you open to get random materials and shards.

Characters have many things to upgrade:

• Increase character level using money, up to your commander level. This is fairly cheap.
• Skills which take skill materials which is not that common so you should concentrate on your best characters. Skill upgrades are capped based on character level.
• Equipment are six slots that take materials. If you equip all six slots you can upgrade to the next tier which then takes the same materials or better materials. Equipping, combining materials, and tiering up all take money. Materials are fairly plentiful and the game tells you where you can get missing materials (almost everything can be farmed from Campaign scenarios).
• Ranking up to rank 7 max takes character shards. Shards in general you get often 1 or 2 and for random characters so ranking up is fairly infrequent.
• ISO-8 is still locked for me so don't know what that is.

This is a game with a lot of activities though not a 24x7 game like Raid Shadow Legends (where I left the game open so I could collect resources every few minutes). It's free-to-play so there is some incentive to pay money to do things faster.

Annoyances:

• Combats are tedious even with auto combat at x2 speed. Especially for campaigns I'd like instant combat and then if I don't get three stars I might do it non-instant to see how I'm failing. Ok I lied a bit. There is an Auto Win option if you've completed a Campaign scenario at 3 stars (i.e. none of your characters died) and for Events. And Campaign scenarios are limited to 5 or 10 per 24 hours unless you use a resource to reset timer. In any case PvP and Raids don't have Auto Win.
• On my iPad going from combat to combat always takes time. I think it's doing network activity each time and this takes 2 to 5 seconds so that gets annoying: start a combat, load screen, finish combat and exit, load screen, go to next combat, load screen.

Overall it's an ok game and fairly typical of the free-to-play energy-based 5v5 combat model. If you like Marvel that a draw (though the character models are not based on the tv shows/movies, not even sure they're based on the comics; I guess they didn't have a license for those). Other than the Marvel characters there is no reason to recommend this game over others.