Doctor Doom does not do small. He builds a castle, stocks it with Doombots and medieval torture devices, and taunts you the whole way up.
That is the energy of The Siege of Castle Doom, the second paid DLC for Marvel Cosmic Invasion. It drops November 10 on PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, Switch 2 and PC. It adds two playable heroes, The Invisible Woman and Doctor Doom himself. It also adds Castle Doom, a run-based roguelite mode, and that is the real headline.
Here’s the thing about arcade brawlers. They feel incredible for an afternoon. You clear the campaign with friends, unlock a few palettes, and the game slides into the backlog. Cosmic Invasion has pulled in more than 1.5 million players since it launched on December 1, 2025, and Tribute Games knows a lot of them hit that wall. Their own level designer said players were asking for a mode with real replayability. Castle Doom is the answer, and on paper it is a sharp one.
What’s Inside Castle Doomstadt
The setup is peak Doom. Annihilus and his Annihilation Wave are tearing through the cosmos, and Victor von Doom decides he is the only one smart enough to stop it. So he builds the Cosmic Inductor, an unstable weapon that might end the universe instead. Your job is to fight up through Castle Doomstadt before he fires it.
Two meters run the whole mode. The Siege Gauge fills every time the castle gets the better of you, and Doom’s forces grow stronger as it climbs. Fill it completely before you reach him and the run ends on the spot. On the other side, every win drops batteries into the Stabilizer, a Reed Richards invention that stalls Doom and powers your upgrades. Reed coaches you through each run while Doom mocks every step you take. Building a whole mode around the Fantastic Four’s oldest rivalry is a great call.
You pick your route by choosing themed doors. Equipment doors grant special powers like force fields or energy blasts. Event doors drop you into an arena with temporary rule changes that can help or hurt. Heal doors patch you up, Infinite doors hand out unlimited ammo or focus, and Progression doors pay out more batteries. Fail a challenge and your fighters eat a debuff, so the choices carry weight.
Collect enough batteries and you start pulling perks from a pool of 12, split across Offense, Defense and Tactical branches. Perks attach to each hero individually, which matters a lot in a tag-team game. Between runs, Reed’s Lab unlocks new equipment, events and modifiers that reshape future attempts.
The castle itself is stacked. Tribute says the mode has more than five times the encounters of the main campaign, before you count events, traps and hazards. Expect blizzards on the Castle Battlements, torture devices in the Halls of Doom, rickety elevator platforms in the Tower of Solitude, and base game bosses back for a rematch alongside Doom’s robot army.
The rest of the package is two fully voiced playable characters with their own movesets, a new color palette for every hero who beats Doom, and fresh tracks from Tee Lopes. All of it is listed at $7.99 on the Nintendo eShop. That is double the $3.99 Tribute charged for the Cyclops and The Thing pack back in May, and it is easily the bigger value.
Sue Storm and Victor von Doom Join the Squad
Susan Storm has been the most powerful member of the Fantastic Four for decades, and games rarely let her show it. Cosmic Invasion gives her light bending and force field manipulation, and Dotemu is pitching her kit as abilities the game has never seen before. Force fields in a tag-team brawler are a big deal. A good barrier buys your partner space, and space is everything when the screen fills up.
Doom brings armor of his own design, occult magic and the genius intellect he never stops mentioning. He has been a fan favorite to play since the Marvel vs. Capcom days, so seeing him in a Tribute brawler feels overdue. The store page also teases a way to rally Doom to your side against Annihilus. That is a fun wrinkle for a guy whose entire DLC is about you breaking into his house.
Hands on, both of them earn their slots. Sue’s shields pull double duty. She can cover her partner when the screen gets crowded, then turn those same barriers into setups for some gnarly combos. Doom hits like the bruiser you’d expect, but his traps are what make him special. A heavy hitter who plays with setups is an excellent change of pace for a character built like that.
They really shine in multiplayer. Sue and Doom both add real depth to team chemistry, and building a duo around Sue’s support or Doom’s traps changes how a pair plays together. That fits right into the per-hero perk system in Castle Doom.
Why the Roguelite Turn Works, and Where It Could Wobble
I’m a big roguelike fan, so this is the part of the DLC I care about most. The Siege Gauge is the smartest design call in the package. Most roguelites treat a loss as the end of the run. Castle Doom treats it as a tax. You keep going, but the castle gets meaner and your margin gets thinner. That rewards clean play without letting one bad room torch an entire attempt.
The per-hero perks are the other big swing. In a tag-team game, you are not building one character. You are building a duo. Stack defense on one hero and damage on the other, and suddenly a pair you know from the campaign plays like something new. In co-op, splitting builds with a friend sounds like a blast, and the MVP screen at the end of each run will settle some arguments.
Reed’s Lab handles the meta loop, the Hades-style layer where even a failed run moves something forward. That layer is the difference between “one more run” and closing the game for the night.
Now the honest worries. Twelve perks is a lean pool for a roguelite, so run variety will live or die on the doors, events and modifiers. The challenge debuffs could sting solo players who don’t have a partner to cover for them. And beat ’em up combat is simpler than a dedicated action roguelite, which makes repetition the genre’s oldest enemy. More than five times the base game’s encounters helps a lot on that front.
I put four to five hours into The Siege of Castle Doom on Steam Deck.
Performance was excellent the whole way through. The loop still had some steam by the end of my time with it, but the post-game meta progression is where Castle Doom comes up short. Reed’s Lab just doesn’t go very deep, so don’t expect a Hades-style unlock tree to keep you hooked for weeks.
The replayability comes from somewhere simpler. Castle Doom is easy to pick up and play with anyone who’s into beat ’em ups or Marvel, and for a co-op brawler, that counts for a lot.
The Verdict
The Siege of Castle Doom goes straight at the problem every great brawler has: what do you do after the credits? Tribute’s answer is a real mode with real hooks, not a cosmetic pack in a trench coat. You get two new heroes, a fresh Tee Lopes soundtrack, a castle with more than five times the base game’s encounters, and a mode that is easy to pick up and play with anyone. The timing is perfect too, landing right ahead of Avengers: Doomsday.
If you bounced off Cosmic Invasion after the campaign, this is your reason to boot it back up. If you never left, you just got a new main mode.
