I have been provided with an advance copy of the new Marvel Crisis Protocol book Target Kree by Stuart Moore, published by Aconyte Books, so here is the honest review I promised in exchange for the book.

So here is an important disclaimer which is always important to put out there first. I have a casual work contact with Asmodee to demonstrate board games for them in stores and at conventions. Asmodee being the parent company of Aconyte the publisher.

I am going to try my best to not let this cloud my judgement in this review, but I accept that subconsciously it might.

What is Marvel

Look at this point I would bore you with a bit of background to the game/universe, but lets not, you all know the Marvel Universe, if you don’t have you been living under a rock!

Marvel Crisis Protocol is a tabletop skirmish miniatures game from Atomic Mass Games based on the Marvel comic characters, with its starter set conations five of the Avengers (Captain America, Captain Marvel, Iron Man, Spider-Man and Black Widow) and five of the Kabel (Barron Zemo, Red Skull, Crossbones, Doctor Octopus and Ultron).

I own the core set and its well worth investing into, if you fancy it you can purchase it from my Element Games affiliate link!

The Story

The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy team up in a search for a planet killer amongst a group of Kree refugees on earth working for Tony Stark.

The story starts with the Guardians of the Galaxy trying to save which is in the middle of being destroyed, but they sadly fail and lose a beloved member in the process.

The story then picks up on earth six months later as the Guardians hunt down the planet killer and Tony Stark (Iron Man) faces the wrath of Jennifer Walters (She Hulk) and Kamala Khan (Ms Marvel) over the conditions of the refugees from the planet, but of course the Guardians crash the party and chaos ensues.

You know what there isn’t much to talk about in regards to the plot, its very simply and as it develops you end up with a huge number of Marvel characters making an appearance, most included in Crisis Protocol, but at least two who are not.

Conclusion

This is a hard book to review, on the one hand, it’s filled with lots of fun and some cool interesting fight sequences.

But there is way too much fighting and not enough stories, especially when you are cramming so many characters into the book.

At points it’s felt like they were just throwing in extra characters for the sake of it, I mean there is a scene with Black Panther that goes nowhere and serves no purpose other than to have Black Panther in the book.

The characters all want the same thing but they are too busy fighting each other to figure that out, and that’s not exactly in keeping with the characters.

The book starts off great, the first part is fantastic, but honestly, I think this would have been better as a comic rather than a prose book.

But then again it is promoting a skirmish combat game.

It’s a 3 1/2 stars from me, and had it just had a bit more dialogue and story in it, it could have really been a lot better. That’s not to say its bad, its actually quite fun, but it wasn’t quite what I was hoping it would be.

But if all you want is literally a fun beat-em-up story, give this a go as it is rather entertaining.

The eBook is released this Friday the 6th July and the paperback hits the shelves on the 2nd September.