I went back and played Marvel Strike Force for a few months, going from level 35 to level 100. I previously reviewed MSF this a couple of years ago and even a spot review five months ago.

This is a game about collecting Marvel Comics characters, upgrading them, then doing missions. Characters are from the comics and MCU and some original ones. Characters have:

• Tags - things like Hero/Villain, City/Cosmic/Mystic, Support/Brawler/Protector/Blaster/Controller, Fantastic Four/X-Men/Sinister Six. Every character is a hero or villain, has a domain (e.g. City), has a role (e.g. Support), and one or more affiliations or other tags. Characters with the same affiliation buff each other if teamed together. Many missions require certain tags.
• Level - you use gold and training xp to level up characters up to a max of your player level. You are often low on gold (used to buy lots of things) or training xp so you're only going to have a few characters at max level but since missions require certain tags you'll be leveling up secondary characters as you need to.
• Rank, Red Stars, Diamond Stars - You rank up by collecting enough character shards and they go from 0 to 7. Red Stars you get from red star character upgrades (random from certain rewards or you can buy them semi-randomly if you have certain monies) and also go from 0 to 7. Diamond stars from diamond star character upgrades similar to red stars but harder to get. Ranking up just increases all character starts.
• Equipment - six equipment slots and you often have to craft equipment and get components from missions. Equipment ranks up to (hero level / 5 - 1) so a level 85 character can get up to rank 16 equipment. Lots of components and equipment can be used by multiple characters (and equipment is always add on never take off).
• Skills - most characters have four skills (minor soldier types have three skills) and skills go up to level 7. You have skill points of various grades to increase skills.
• ISO-8 - each role has five ISO-8 greens stats which you can upgrade to level 5. Then at character level 50 you can upgrade them to ISO-8 blue stats (if they've maxed out on green first). Then at 75 you can upgrade to ISO-8 purple. When you max out a color you can choose a specialty (e.g. Striker or Healer) which then gives you extra bonuses and/or abilities (e.g. Healer would make some of your attacks also heal allies a bit). I think you can switch specialties though I never did.
• ??? - I saw an upgrade component in the stores but didn't get to a level where I had the option to use them so don't know what it does.

So a lot of effort to upgrade characters though other than choosing ISO-8 specialties a given character upgrades the same so another player with the same character at the same level and upgrade is exactly the same. The choice becomes which character to upgrade as you kind of want teams or widely used characters but characters also have rarity so legendary characters are always better at a given character and upgrade level.

The rest of the game is a lot of missions to do. Missions take energy points of various types and give you set (though sort of random) rewards so you are often doing certain mission to get certain components or character shards. Luckily if you go to a component or character and click Find it'll show you the missions that have that item and you can do them.

There are also alliance wars and high level challenges. Overall I think I was spending two or three hour a day playing. A lot of it waiting for a combat to complete (you can do combats in auto at 2x speed) and the AI is not too bad.

Good graphics. Slightly laggy on my iPhone SE3 (and much more so on my old 2018 iPad Pro). I didn't spend any money so nothing lost and I can always come back and continue.

Overall still kind of a mid game since you don't actually have much choice in building up your character pool. It's just doing missions and getting random rewards and you can lean it one way or another but it doesn't feel like you have a lot of choices.