Fans of TinyCo's game Avengers Academy are accustomed to special events. Every since the game--which features Marvel's famous superheroes as students at a school run by S.H.I.E.LD--was released earlier this year, several special events were released (including a Civil War Event and a Spider-Man Event). During these events, you can unlock special characters, buildings, and other items. The latest event, which focused on the Defenders of Hell's Kitchen, started on August 25th and ended last week. While many things went well with this event, many things fell just out of reach.

The event opened with the announcement that Kingpin (aka Wilson Fisk) demanded that Nick Fury stand trial for his crimes, which included letting a bunch of superheroes loose on New York City and "inviting" alien attacks on the city. Fisk is the headmaster of his own boarding school, where he keeps Defenders Matt Murdock (Daredevil), Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist (Danny Rand), and Elecktra locked up and under the watchful eye of the Punisher. Matt, a blind law student who Fury chose to represent him in court, is the first of the characters to that had to be broken out and then recruited. Through the course of his storyline quest, you had to also build the Academy Courthouse using ninja stars, the special currency for this event. Other characters available to unlock through quests were Hellcat, aka Patsy Walker, Iron Fist, and finally, Luke Cage. Jessica Jones was a premium character and could be bought for 415 Infinity Shards (which are purchased with real money), while Elecktra was one of the prizes in the Mystical Ninja Crate, which could be unlocked for 75 Infinity Shards. Each crate that was unlocked gave the player a different random prize.

Similar to the Spider-Man event in June, this event featured individual villains for the heroes to fight. In this case, it was ninjas, standing on crates in the new Hell's Kitchen scenery around the campus. Three heroes could be selected to fight the ninjas, depending on their skill set. Regular characters could also gain different skins which would enable them to fight alongside the Defenders. Loki got a lawyer outfit to defend Kingpin, Falcon got a Kung-Fu outfit, and Wasp became a mobster in stylish pinstripes. When defeated, the ninjas "dropped" ninja star currency, katanas, and cameras, all of which could be used to upgrade or unlock a character or prize (the cameras were specifically for Jessica Jones). Once a ninja was defeated you could unlock the crate he was standing on with a key from the Sacred Bell, the first prize from "The Devil's Due," a listing of objects a player has to win. A majority of the prizes from "The Devil's Due" were needed in order to get items required for recruiting characters, which is typical. Not all of the prizes were required, though, and that helped to move things along. One of the things you could unlock was The Punisher, who had been Kingpin's right hand man. This is also par for the course in the game; they've made recruiting villains an option or even mandatory before, sometimes to the ire of fans. Thankfully, Punisher was not one of those cases, but unfortunately, in order to unlock him, you first had to defeat him several times and then defeat Kingpin several times. Not many players made it that far.

Another complaint players have are in regards to the quests. Some of the special quests were just to unlock bobblehead statues of the characters. While they're not required quests and don't help the story, they can be annoying. Additionally, quests that may take hours to complete don't pay as much as regular missions from the board.

In the midst of this event, TinyCo decided to surprise their players by releasing Peggy Carter as a playable character to coincide with the DVD release of Captain America: Civil War. Though she was a premium character and therefore costs Infinity Shards to unlock, she was a part of a short-term deal. For each day a player logged in, 100 shards would be dedicated from the total cost (700 shards). So, after one week, Peggy was a free character for anyone to unlock. Though the timing could've been better, fans were extremely pleased with this decision. Virtually anyone could get Peggy with no hassle, and could immediately start playing with her rather than have to unlock and then recruit her. Hopefully, TinyCo will do this with their other premium characters in the character shop, such as War Machine, Quake, and Vision, all of which costs hundreds of shards.

So while the event had its ups and downs, it was overall a success. The problems it had were problems with the game overall; too expensive heroes, ridiculous requirements to recruit and upgrade characters, and villains that are just too hard to beat. This event also had a lot of moving parts, which caused a lot of players to run out of time. However, it seems like TinyCo is slowly learning from the mistakes they've made with past events. Hopefully they will continue to improve gameplay for everyone, but we can definitely wait a while for the next event.