I was already excited for Marvel Cosmic Invasion after the studio's incredible retro TMNT brawler, and 30 minutes of hands-on has me even more confident that the spirit of '90s arcade gaming is alive and well

Developer Tribute Games has been proving its retro bonafides for years, and arguably its best work yet came in the form of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge, a pitch-perfect love letter to the bygone age of co-op arcade brawlers. Now the studio is back with Marvel Cosmic Invasion, which builds on the excellent beat-em-up foundations established with TMNT, and after a brief hands-on at Summer Game Fest, it's looking like an even better, bigger tribute to the classics.

If you've ever played a classic beat-em-up, you'll understand the basics immediately. Pick a character, walk from left to right, and punch an army of evildoers into submission along the way. The key difference here is that you're playing as an array of Marvel superheroes, which opens up a lot more in the way of unique abilities and movement options, and you choose a team of characters to tag between as you like.

For my first run, I paired up with Wolverine and Storm. Wolverine's claw attacks let him unleash some vicious combos, while Storm is able to unleash tornados at a distance for very effective crowd control. There's no limit on your ability to tag between the two characters, and you can even call in your reserve partner for quick assist attacks without tagging out, which really opens up some wild combo possibilities.

Avengers (and others) assemble

You're incentivized to choose a pair of characters with pretty different abilities, especially when it comes to dealing with airborne foes. Every character has some sort of midair move, but with heroes who can fly - like Storm - you can simply tap the A button in midair to take to the skies and start punching winged baddies on equal footing. I found myself regularly using Storm to knock flying enemies down, then following up on them with Wolverine claws, calling in assists here and there to keep tornados on the ground so I wouldn't be swarmed by mobile ground enemies while dealing the final blows.

It's all snappy and satisfying, and while I had a good deal of fun simply button-mashing through the demo, it's clear that there'll be enough depth to allow for some serious combo potential. I was particularly impressed by how different the characters felt from each other, too. Brawlers are a repetitive genre by nature, but swapping back and forth between the quick, violent movements of Wolverine and Storm's more restrained, crowd-control powers kept things feeling fresh.

Later, I got the chance to play as Spider-Man and Venom, who have obvious similarities with melee-based attacks and web-swinging midair moves, but still manage to feel wildly different from each other. Spidey is a finesse character, whose webbing is great at managing enemies from a distance. Venom meanwhile is satisfyingly brutal, with big powerful punches and an awesome-feeling throw move where he simply grabs enemies by the face and absolutely launches them across the screen.

Marvel Cosmic Invasion supports up to four players, and with two characters apiece, you can get over half of the 15 character roster in play at once, which sounds chaotically fun. My session only had two players, but with both of us swapping back and forth between our chosen characters and regularly unleashing big, screen-clearing special moves, it was a cacophony of colorful violence. I can imagine the action getting a little hard to track as more players come in, but honestly that might just add to the charm.

The game's bold, bright colors pop like a Saturday morning cartoon, and there's loads of little background details adding personality, from the Daily Bugle posters plastered across the streets of New York City to the SHIELD soldiers doing battle with AIM invaders atop the helicarrier. Many of these little details aren't just cosmetic, either - the assaulted helicarrier is full of holes you can knock enemies into, and there are even a few guns mounted on the deck which you can punch to vaporize foes at a distance.

TMNT: Shredder's Revenge set one heck of a blueprint for arcade brawlers, and Marvel Cosmic Invasion is building on it in a big way. It feels like a wonderful tribute to both a classic genre and the Marvel universe, and after actually getting to play it for myself, I'm even more excited to grab a group of friends and go for a heroic justice brawl when the game launches later this year.

The ranks of the best Marvel games already have some very strong contenders.