Marvel’s Avengers The Winter Soldier Abilities Video Punches Out, Here’s a Breakdown of His Skills

Marvel's Avengers Update 1.000.051

With The Winter Soldier set to be unleashed in the Marvel’s Avengers next week, Crystal Dynamics has now released a new video showing just what the character can do on the battlefield. Check out the Marvel’s Avengers The Winter Soldier abilities featurette below, which also touches on the anti-hero’s origins a bit, too.

Marvel’s Avengers The Winter Soldier Abilities Video:

Marvel’s Avengers The Winter Soldier Skills:

Specialization: Close-up and mid-range

Intrinsic Ability: Steel-Forged Tenacity

Bucky can modify his basic abilities by turning on his intrinsic ability Steel-Forged Tenacity. Charged by parrying damage, leading to a customizable defensive boost.

Intrinsic Overcharge: Red Star Rising

Triggers an area of effective damage explosion good for clearing small mobs. Time-based bonus gives increased armor and melee damage.

Light Sprint Intrinsic Attack: Glinting Blade

Deals damage with his knife.

Heavy Sprint Intrinsic Attack: Explosive Entrance

Powerhouse slam that will send enemies flying.

Signature Air Attack: So Below

Slams into ground sending shockwave that staggers enemies.

Heavy Power Attack: Buck Shot

Can be upgraded to a combination ranged attack that gives access to various modes of his rifle including a fully automatic high-powered piercing rounds and his grenade launcher.

Ranged Attack: Suppressive Fire

Blasts three high damage rounds, when charged up fires a sengle high-powered round that can pierce armor or even multiple enemies at once.

Traversal: Grappling hook and wallrun

Support Heroic: Soldier Tech Nonsense

Let’s Bucky turn invisible on the battlefield even when attacking

Assault Heroic: Air Strike

Lets Bucky call in an airstrike that drops multiple bombs in succession

Ultimate Heroic: Protocol Override

Perform a biotic slam stops enemies in their tracks and marks enemies for assassination within a 40-meter range around Bucky. This allows Bucky and his allies to takedown enemies without needing to stun them. This also gives Bucky increased melee damage and a new knife combo attack

If that’s not enough, Reddit user Uglyguy25 posted a detailed breakdown of Bucky Barnes’ moveset and more.

Takedowns

Just a small compilation of all the takedowns shown in all three trailers so far (the narrative trailer, the Cloning Labs trailer and today’s featurette). Not much to say here other than letting the footage speak for itself

Melee Attacks

Speaking of parries, his light parry attack uses the same animation as Cap’s signature combo finisher, which consists of using the metal arm to sweep a single enemy (or two, if you’re lucky) off its feet. The heavy parry attack looks cooler as it involves Bucky planting a grenade on the enemy and watching it blasts them away. Bucky’s parries seem to follow the theme of the light attack setting up enemies for melee attacks and the heavy one pushing them back to set them up for ranged attacks, which is also present in other characters’ parries.

Intrinsic Ability


Sounds exactly like Black Panther’s intrinsic ability to me, as “Bucky can modify his basic abilities by turning on his intrinsic ability Steel-Forged Tenacity. This is charged by parrying damage, leading to a customizable defensive boost”, while the intrinsic overcharge is activated exactly like Black Panther’s Percussive Blast and also gives him an armor and damage boost while active. That is not to say it looks like a bad ability though.

Speaking of parries, his light parry attack uses the same animation as Cap’s signature combo finisher, which consists of using the metal arm to sweep a single enemy (or two, if you’re lucky) off its feet. The heavy parry attack looks cooler as it involves Bucky planting a grenade on the enemy and watching it blasts them away. Bucky’s parries seem to follow the theme of the light attack setting up enemies for melee attacks and the heavy one pushing them back to set them up for ranged attacks, which is also present in other characters’ parries.

Ranged Attacks

Supressive Fire consists of Bucky using his rifle in a three-round burst configuration, and must be his first ranged option. It seems to have decent damage and impact, probably your go-to option for mid-range crowd control as Bucky can be seen stopping multiple small and medium enemies charging at him dead in their tracks with it. Its ranged power attack (AKA the charged version that can break block) is a high-powered piercing round that travels through multiple enemies, much like the charged shots from Black Widow’s regular and High Caliber pistols. Bucky’s charged shot seems to cause a way stronger reaction however, knocking medium enemies away for several meters.

Fully automatic mode is mentioned during the power attack segment of the featurette along with the grenade launcher configuration, but curiously both were only shown in the other trailers. Fully automatic must be the second ranged option, preferable for sustained damage. But as I noted in the other breakdown, it’s hard to tell how much damage and impact it has as the only enemy shown in the receiving end of it was one of the large Klaw mercenaries, which are notably more resistant to impact than most enemies and have big enough health bars to not go down quickly. The accuracy seems to go down a bit in comparison to Supressive Fire, but that is to be expected from fully automatic weapons, and the bullet spread is still nowhere near Black Widow’s Full Auto shot. I also expect Supressive Fire and fully automatic mode to share the same bullet counter since Bucky will be using the same ammo type and the same weapon between both fire modes, but hopefully this will also mean that switching between them will be faster than usual.

Finally, the grenade launcher configuration, AKA the third ranged option. Unfortunately this one is only shown very briefly, so there isn’t much I can say about other than that it’s… there. It had no trajectory line in the footage, but I’m expecting this to be just a trailer thing where they turn off all UI features. I’d be very surprised if charging the shot didn’t cause Bucky to aim it farther, much like Kate’s Explosive Arrows and Clint’s Pulsar Arrows.

Heroics

Air Strike is the assault heroic and immediately comparable to Hawkeye’s Nightstorm Arrow. Not much to say about this one other than what the footage already shows either, although I am curious about the specializations. Nightstorm Arrow’s specializations drastically change that attack’s hitbox, and I’m honestly not expecting that level of variation for an air strike, but who knows?

Soldier Tech Nonsense – the support heroic – immediately gets the award for best heroic name ever and comes with a cool trigger animation, but that’s about it. It looks exactly like Black Widow’s Veil of Shadows and nothing in the trailer is said or shown to make me think otherwise. Again, that’s not bad gameplay wise since it’s a very useful ability, but we’ve been there and done that. Remember when they showed the Wormhole and Singularity specializations of the Warp Arrow in Kate Bishop’s trailer, and both blew our minds? When the base ability isn’t that interesting, exploring its specializations and whatever makes it stand out from the rest of the game is the way to go.

The ultimate heroic is seemingly a mix of Cap’s support and ultimate heroics: it debuffs enemies by marking them like Rally Cry and gives Bucky a new light combo and extra damage like Brooklyn Brawler. In the other breakdown, I mentioned that I was kinda hoping the debuff on enemies wouldn’t consist just of making them take increased damage like Rally Cry, so I was glad to hear that Bucky’s mark – Assassination, as the featurette called it – actually makes it so that enemies can receive takedowns from everyone in the team. Sure, that’s reminiscent of Spidey’s Wreckage, but it actually sounds incredibly useful not just for Bucky but everyone else too: takedowns aren’t just a fancy way to hurt enemies, but also a way to get healed and generate an orb. So the narrator wasn’t kidding when she said this heroic is good for when things aren’t going your way, as it can be a tide turner… against normal enemies. The instant takedown functionality will probably be just as useful against bosses as Spidey’s Wreckage, unfortunately, unless an upgrade or specialization gives it an additional debuff that actually works on them. And to make up for being so powerful against those regular enemies, Protocol Override only marks enemies hit by the initial attack that triggers the heroic (the ground pound that Bucky executes WITH THE WRONG ARM), unlike Rally Cry, which keeps marking enemies hit by any subsequent attack for as long as the heroic is active.

Along with the Assassination debuff and increased damage, Protocol Override also gives you a brand new ultimate heroic combo. It consists of Bucky using a knife to deliver 5 slashes, and is immediately comparable to Brooklyn Brawler’s light combo simply because of how they’re unlocked. But unlike Brooklyn Brawler’s combo, this one has way less range and doesn’t knock enemies away in the end (it is a knife after all, not a vibranium shield being thrown like a frisbee). This could be good for keeping enemies at melee range, but otherwise I don’t see many advantages in this new combo outside of the speed and how cool it looks. It does seem to have enough impact to keep staggering enemies at each hit though, including annoying prime synthoids that love to block and push you back in the middle of your favorite combo, but that is normal for ultimate heroic attacks.

The Winter Soldier enters Marvel’s Avengers this November 29, you can read up on the rest of the new stuff incoming with the character right here.

Top Games and Upcoming Releases