Technologies

Marvel Rivals’ New Costume Customization Is Fairly Priced, but There’s a Problem

A couple dollars isn’t much to pay for in-depth skin customization, but you can’t spend your existing Units on the new feature.

Marvel Rivals’ latest Season 2 feature is targeted at all the fashionistas out there. Costume customization lets players change the color palette of their skin, creating a new in-game look that suits them best.

The new palette swap customization isn’t free and isn’t available on every skin, though more skins will be available to customize as time goes on. Four reskins shipped with the feature’s introduction.

Unlocking costume customization will cost you the in-game currency equivalent of $6 per skin, but you can freely change the color to any variation released for a skin you bought customization on as they are released.

The pricing of these reskins is actually generous compared with Rivals’ largest competitor: Overwatch 2. Palette-swapped legendary reskins in Blizzard’s first-person hero shooter have typically cost just as much as the original skin, and unlocking the black-and-gold customization for special Mythic skins costs the equivalent of $20.

The $6 price tag for Marvel Rivals costume customization is a tame monetization practice in comparison. But the biggest problem with the new feature isn’t the price tag — it’s the introduction of Unstable Molecules, which feels like an unnecessary additional currency introduced to lure players into spending more money.

Marvel Rivals is developing a currency bloat problem

There were already three separate currencies to manage in the game, alongside the occasional addition of special tokens that let players interact with limited-time events like Galacta’s Cosmic Adventure.

Of the three existing currencies, most players will interact with Chrono Tokens, the purple currency, as it’s available to free-to-play Marvel Rivals players. These tokens unlock rewards on the battle pass. Whereas most games have experience points that unlock battle pass tiers, Chrono Tokens are a currency that disappears at the end of a season.

Units and Lattice are the current premium currencies in Marvel Rivals. Lattice is the gold coin that you directly pay — most microtransactions convert your money into this currency to spend in-game, at a rate of $1 to 100 Lattice.

Units, the blue currency, are what you need to buy most of the premium costume bundles in the game — so you need to convert your Lattice to Units at a one-to-one exchange rate when you’re buying costumes.

That brings us to the new cosmetics system. As if that wasn’t overly complicated enough, costume customization now requires a new currency: Unstable Molecules. Unstable Molecules aren’t Units, but they might as well be. You exchange Lattice to Unstable Molecules at the same one-to-one rate.

The only difference between these currencies is that you use Units to purchase costumes, emotes, sprays and account name changes, and you use Unstable Molecules to purchase the costume customization feature for skins you already own.

The decision to add another currency for no reason needlessly complicates Marvel Rivals’ microtransactions — and the system was already pretty opaque as it stands. Maybe that’s by design, as trading in multiple fictional currencies helps obscure the real dollar cost that players are sinking into their in-game cosmetics.

The addition of Unstable Molecules feels like an anti-consumer move. The costume customization prices are fair when you compare them with the competition’s asking prices for similar cosmetic tweaks, but the new feature should be bought and paid for with Units. There’s no need to add another currency to Marvel Rivals, unless the entire point is to create another way to obfuscate and inflate player spending.

How to unlock costume customization in Marvel Rivals

You can rock palette-swapped versions of some of your favorite Marvel Rivals costumes right now. Costume customization is live in Marvel Rivals — for a handful of skins. Here are the skins the new feature is compatible with right now:

Magik Punkchild: Rosy Resilience skin variant
Psylocke Vengeance: Phantom Purple skin variant
Luna Snow Mirae 2099: Plasma Pulse skin variant
Winter Soldier Blood Soldier: Winter’s Wrath skin variant

Each costume customization is available for purchase for 600 Unstable Molecules. The customizations are purchasable as part of the costume’s listing under the store tab in the main menu. You need to own the base skin before you can purchase the costume customization color variants.

Unstable Molecules are currently only available in a one-to-one exchange with the Lattice premium currency, but the costume customization announcement in the official Marvel Rivals Discord server mentioned that there will be new ways to earn Unstable Molecules in Season 3.

Technologies

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Technologies

WWE 2K25 Jumps From the Top Rope Onto PlayStation Plus in September

Subscribers will also be able to play a turn-based strategy Persona game.

«The American Nightmare» Cody Rhodes, son of one of the greatest pro wrestlers of all time, «The American Dream» Dusty Rhodes, is the current undisputed WWE champion. And PlayStation Plus subscribers can bring Rhodes down a peg or help establish a new wrestling dynasty with the champion beginning on Sept. 16 in WWE 2K25.

PlayStation Plus is Sony’s version of Xbox Game Pass, and it offers subscribers a large and constantly expanding library of games. There are three PlayStation Plus tiers — Essential ($10 a month), Extra ($15 a month) and Premium ($18 a month) — and each gives subscribers access to games. However, only Extra and Premium tier subscribers can access the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog.

Here are all the games PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers can access starting on Sept. 16. You can also check out the games all PS Plus subscribers can play in September, including Psychonauts 2.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

WWE 2K25

Take control of your favorite superstar from the men’s and women’s divisions in this knockdown, dragout wrestling game. Become one of over 300 wrestlers from today and years past, like Rhea Ripley and Andre the Giant. This entry in the series also introduces intergender wrestling matches, barricade diving and new brawl environments where you can get over or turn heel.

Persona 5 Tactica

Join the Phantom Thieves in this real-time strategy game set in the Persona universe. You and the group wander into a bizarre realm where people are living under tyrannical oppression, and you cross paths with a revolutionary named Erina. Now you’re in cahoots with the rebels as you try to free an oppressed people and find your way back home.

Other games on PS Plus

Those are a few of the games Sony is bringing to PlayStation Plus, and subscribers can play these games as well starting on Sept. 16.

*Premium subscribers only.

For more on PlayStation Plus, here’s what to know about the service and a rundown of PS Plus Extra and Premium games added in August. You can also check out the latest and upcoming games on Xbox Game Pass and Apple Arcade.

Technologies

Little Nightmares 3 Hands-On: a Creepy Co-Op Game Arriving Just in Time for Halloween

The sequel adds cooperative play with all the haunting hallmarks of the earlier games.

After about an hour playing Little Nightmares 3, I’d used a person’s bisected halves to solve a puzzle, gotten a high score in a carnival shooting game and escaped the murderous claws of a deranged baby. As a 2-foot-tall youth trying to survive the morbid dangers of one demented area after another with my co-player, I was terrified and delighted.

I’ve only sampled the first two Little Nightmares games, but in my brief preview of Little Nightmares 3, it felt like a refined version of the series’ premise: small protagonists endangered by a large, grim world filled with traps to evade, puzzles to solve and horrid, lethal enemies to outwit. Take the scale of the animated horror movie 9, mix it with the darkest of stop-motion director Henry Selick’s maudlin settings and let players enjoy the haunting ride, room by perilous room.

This time, players aren’t alone. In Little Nightmares 3, developed by Supermassive Games, two players (or one and an AI companion) choose between characters Low (a bird-masked boy with a bow) and Alone (a girl with a jumpsuit and a wrench), who rely on each other and get out of rooms using their unique tools or just good ol’ fashioned teamwork. Sometimes this means pushing a box for the other to jump on, but other obstacles require rather complex puzzle-solving.

In the game, Low and Alone seek to escape the bleak Nowhere and its roulette of dystopian lands. My preview was limited to one of these areas — Carnevale, a demented circus where our small characters had to sneak under the feet of grotesque, ambling workers (or their corpses, tied up or swinging for the sport of their fellows). When we thought we were safe, possessed puppets sprinted after us until we could team up to knock their wooden heads off and crush them. Being noticed by anyone meant our demise, requiring frantic cooperation amid the anxious stakes of rather gruesome deaths.

It’s this tension and the dour setting that sets Little Nightmares 3 apart from other co-op games like the more excitable and dynamic Split Fiction released earlier this year, a rollercoaster flipbook of game genres that made for a breathless if not terribly coherent experience. In contrast, the section of Little Nightmares 3 I played unfolded like a series of grim vignettes that rely on its pleasingly goth trappings as much as working together with your friend (or computer teammate) to progress.

Surviving your little nightmares

While I got only an hour with the game, Little Nightmares 3 seems to iterate on rather than innovate away from its predecessors: Expect more of the same in new, grotesque settings, just with the welcome addition of tightly designed teamwork dynamics. For fans of the series, this is likely a good thing. There’s not much else like Little Nightmares.

The Carnevale stage I played through opened up with rain pelting red-and-white circus tent tops, which I as the masked Low (and someone from Bandai Namco who kindly played as the jumpsuit-wearing Alone) skittered between. Lumbering above us were brutish factory workers seeking escape at the funfair, which very quickly turned sinister as we very shortly saw some hanging tied-up as others took turns beating them like a piñata. We entered one room to find one worker in connected boxes as the subject of a magician’s saw-in-half trick…which was no trick, as we had to separate the halves to climb out of a window. I tried, and failed, to ignore the viscera slopping out of the boxes.

While we hid from the human-size enemies, we had to fight the wooden puppets. Like Geppeto’s most horrid creations, they ambushed us in several rooms, requiring me to knock their heads off with Low’s bow and run away from their decapitated bodies while my teammate rushed forward to crush their heads with Alone’s wrench.

But most of the rooms are about solving puzzles, which could be as simple as moving a box for my teammate to jump up and pull a switch or figure out how a radio plays into a complex solution. While these quiet moments are a nice break from the tense combat or pursuit, they also give time to appreciate the macabre backgrounds: I ran past one room with a circle of empty tall chairs only to come back a few seconds later to find them filled with puppets, unmoving but watching.

And then there are the really, really tense moments. We moved from the carnival to the adjoining candy factory (apparently where all those brutes work) and up to the offices where the boss works, to find him asleep with the TV droning on in the darkness…and his frankly hideous baby nestled next to him. Naturally, we had to make noise, cranking open a grate, awakening the terrifying spawn who ran after us. After many, many failed escapes, my teammate and I discovered we had to scramble for a hiding place after making it past the grate.

This was perhaps the most frustrating part of the preview as we panicked looking for a solution to our deadly woes (as opposed to the slow, methodical gameplay earlier) — but that’s part of the tension, especially when adding a teammate to the mix. Ultimately, it was a hard-won lesson in patience. In the next room, a kitchen, the nightmarish baby banged a bowl on the table until the father walked over to a corpse (presumably his worker) and cut out some meat for his ghoulish child to eat.

In my short time with it, Little Nightmares 3 seems like a cooperative spooky storybook for players and their friends (but not couch buddies, sadly — it’s online co-op only) to experience. How much it lives up to previous games in the series, especially as developer Supermassive Games takes more of the reins from the franchise’s original creators Tarsier Games, is anyone’s guess. (Tarsier’s similar spiritual sequel to Little Nightmares, Reanimal, is coming in 2026.)

But as the air turns crisp and Halloween beckons, it’s the best time of the year for a creepy co-op game like Little Nightmares 3 to land.

Little Nightmares 3 comes out Oct.10, 2025, for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.