Not to be confused with the excellent LEGO Marvel Superheroes, LEGO Marvel’s Avengers is a Marvel Cinematic Universe-specific take on the familiar LEGO game formula, which has mostly led to a game littered with obvious, unfortunate restrictions that end up making this one of the weakest of the many LEGO games. Above: Watch the first 15 minutes of the PS4 version. The plot's so mixed up and out of order it’s likely to confuse. The plot is perhaps the most obvious problem, due to the way it frantically jumps between scenes from The Avengers, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: The First Avenger, Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Rather than being an interesting take on the MCU chronology, it’s so mixed up and out of order it’s likely to confuse anyone who hasn’t watched all of those films fairly recently. It feels a lot more like a series of uncoordinated vignettes than the high-quality, cohesive package we’ve come to expect from LEGO games.
Ignoring that mess, the occasional crashes, and a tedious puzzle minigame that pops up far too often, LEGO Marvel’s Avengers is still a fairly decent third-person action-adventure that mostly focuses on fairly light, simple combat and some environmental puzzle solving, usually using abilities from specific characters to flick switches, pull levers, and open locked doors. If you’ve ever played a LEGO game before, you know the drill. Above: Watch the launch trailer. You’ll execute a devastating, engaging, and often fairly funny team combo move. The one good innovation here is the cinematic team combos, showcased in the first mission, an impressive recreation of the opening scene from The Avengers. Where previously most combat in the LEGO games has been a series of mashing buttons to get through to the next, equally-blocky bad guy, LEGO Avengers introduces more involving, specifically timed QTE-like sequences. Here, an enemy will have a button prompt above their head and, if you press it at the right time (and the window is generous), you’ll execute a nicely animated combo move.
Do this while you’re near a co-op partner and you’ll execute a devastating, engaging, and often fairly funny team combo move, with animations that vary depending on the two characters involved. Hulk ends up punching Thor at the end of theirs, for one. The environments in that first level, and a strange assortment of others - but not all of them - are also the most realistic looking, dense places we’ve seen so far in any LEGO game. The various open-world ‘hubs’ - Manhattan, Asgard, Sokovia, Washington D.C., Barton’s Farm, S.H.I.E.L.D. Base and Malibu - are all remarkably well-fleshed out, familiar locations that are a delight to simply wander around, but they’re also littered with collectibles and side-quests. In any of these hubs, you can pull up a list of one of the 200+ playable characters and pick any that you’ve unlocked to traverse the environments with - Quicksilver is particularly good to use in Manhattan, for example, considering it’s so big and he’s so fast.
Almost everything in LEGO Marvel’s Avengers is co-op friendly, too - even the open world and the side-quests within them can be played by two players at once, both doing totally different things (including separate side quests), with dynamic or a horizontally fixed split-screen. This means you can unlock extra characters and character variations twice as fast. In some scenes one player is almost completely useless. Some of the story missions aren’t quite the same, though, since of the more epic battles from the films - like Hulk versus Iron Man’s Hulk Buster - has the second player doing almost nothing, waiting for the first to finish fighting the Hulk. Because of a stubborn adherence to movie accuracy there are a surprising amount of sequences like this, where one player is almost completely useless, in a way that takes a lot of the fun out of those co-op experiences. It’s not a constant flaw, but, in comparison to previous LEGO games, it stands out. Attempts at keeping the game as close to the movies as possible also affected the audio in unfortunate ways.
Lines of dialogue pulled straight from the films and mixed into the game sound really unnatural, and dull compared to some of the newly recorded lines from Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill and Clark Gregg as Agent Coulson. While on paper the idea of using the voices of actors we’ve come to know from the films sounds like it would make the game feel much more authentic, it also means a lot of awkward silences and repetition of lines - they couldn’t record new dialogue, so instead they sometimes don’t say anything at all where it seems like they should. If you like the LEGO game formula, you have a preference for playing solo and you’re a huge fan of MCU, there’s still a lot of value for you in LEGO Marvel’s Avengers, even despite a disjointed plot and annoying audio mixes. If you haven’t played any of the others and you’re thinking about picking up this one, I’d advise starting with just about any other game instead. This the weakest LEGO game I’ve played thus far, and had me missing games like LEGO Marvel Super Heroes and LEGO Dimensions.
[Note: Former IGN editor Greg Miller contributed to the making of this game. To ensure impartiality, we selected a reviewer who joined IGN after Greg's departure.]LEGO Marvel's AvengersAvailable on: PSVita, 3DSPublisher: Warner Brothers Interactive EntertainmentDeveloper: Traveller's Tales With Christmas all over and done with now, it's time to turn our attention to the games we'll be playing this new year - and arguably one of the biggest releases this side of Easter is the next in a long, long line of LEGO games, LEGO Marvel Avengers. At a recent event in London, Warner took the time to show off not only the "big brother" home console game - but the handheld version too. A rather different game with different levels, LEGO Marvel's Avengers on the 3DS and PS Vita brings the handheld version closer to the home console take than ever before - and is a pretty impressive game in its own right. In fact, you could say we have a bit of a soft spot for handheld games in general, spending a substantial amount of our playing time on either the 3DS or PS Vita - so the fact that so many handheld versions seem to get glossed over makes us pretty sad pandas here at Everybody Plays.
With a refreshing change from convention, LEGO Marvel Avengers may not quite be the definitive version of the game, but it tries it's best - and for the benefit of being able to get our LEGO fix on the bus, we're willing to let some stuff slide. There was one thing Warner Bros forgot though - we've looked in every corner of the internet (and supplied press kit), and as of the time of starting writing, there seems to be a bit of a handheld screenshot drought. So, with a game to gush about, but no screens to illustrate its glory, what is a poor writer to do? God bless Microsoft Paint. Thanks to my questionable art skills, you won't have to brave this preview with naught but your imagination to guide you, as we have our very best artists impressions to fill in the blanks! Generally speaking, the smaller, more portable format of the 3DS and PS Vita have meant the LEGO games have had to make a few concessions over the years - or at least take a slightly different route. While the lack of two player co-op is a bit of a downer, the handheld's somewhat less impressive power means they couldn't handle the large, open world hubs that the console games seem to have a particular penchant for - at least, until now.
Through some sort of programming wizardry, the folks at Cheshire based TT Fusion have somehow managed to squeeze a huge, brand new hub world for LEGO Marvel Avengers on to a handheld, for the first time ever on a portable console. While it's not quite the sprawling Manhattan metropolis of the Playstation, Xbox and Wii U entries, the open area does come with its own helping of missions, bonus objectives and side quests for you to complete outside of the more traditional LEGO levels. And as anyone who's played the previous LEGO Marvel game will tell you, there's only one hero you can use to get around the streets of Manhattan - and that's Hulk. Having grown rather attached to Hulk in the previous game, where we killed way too much time running and smashing our way through the Manhattan streets, studs flying everywhere, we decided to take the big green destruction machine for a spin on the more pocket-sized screen of the PS Vita. And, because we were playing as Hulk, it seemed appropriate that our first stop off in the new hub world would be a Smash Challenge.
Slap bang in the middle of a basketball court, it challenged us to do 15,000 studs worth of damage for a gold medal. Oddly enough, just standing around mashing a button doesn't actually seem to help all that much here - while you'll cause some destruction, you won't do as much as if you simply put your head down and run. Like a big green bull in a concrete jungle china shop, we tore up a trail across Manhattan, taking cars, pensioners and benches with us, nabbing ourselves a gold with time to spare. Although LEGO Marvel's Avengers may see many heroes returning, many have been given the once over, and now come complete with new moves, abilities or skills. Somewhat brilliantly, Hulk is one such character, and not only is he as strong as a tank, but now he can also jump like a rocket too, with the help of the brand new super jump ability, which lets you launch 'big figs' like Hulk miles and miles up into the air with a touch (or rather, a hold) of a button, before coming crashing down rather destructively - time your leaps and landings, and you can leap from one end of Manhattan to the other too, like a giant green rocket-powered kangaroo.
Of course, a new hub world's all fine and dandy, but the meat of a LEGO game is still in it's levels - and LEGO Marvel Avengers level's are the same mix of scenery smashing, enemy bashing and light puzzle solving we've come to expect from the series, albeit in a more bite-sized, portable form. Kicking off the new story mode, which spans both Avengers films, you find yourself slap bang in the middle of the Avengers: Age of Ultron intro, in a snowy Russian-ish forest on the hunt for HYDRA terrorist Strucker and Loki's stolen sceptre. A high-octane intro to the second film, which played up to each of the Avengers' strengths with a rather explosive battle sequence, it may seem like a bit of a strange place to start the story off, but we've been assured in a recent interview that it makes perfect sense, with the events of the first Avengers film covered via a series of flashback-style sequences. Other Marvel universe films will be getting a brief look in too, with levels inspired by the 'Phase two' films Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World and Captain America: The Winter Soldier films.
And so we found ourselves thrown head-first into combat from the get go, beginning with good old Cap. Facing off against some men on the snow-covered cliffs above him, we decided to go all fancy on them, and reflect their bullets back at them with the help of Captain America's shield - at which point some more 'help' arrives, in the form of Black Widow. Showing precisely why everyone complains about women drivers, she crashes straight through the middle of the scuffle in her car, which we waste no time in smashing to bits and rebuilding into a bouncy pad to get us up onto the aforementioned cliffs and on our way towards Strucker's castle. During our little cliff top jaunt, with us (as Cap) and the computer controlled Black Widow dispatching enemies left, right and centre, we got a quick peak at some of the new team moves too, which let the Avengers team up to deal even more damage to enemies via a number of showy moves. In the case of the Captain America and Black Widow combo, the blink-and-you'll-miss-it move involved the acrobatic Scarlett Johannson mini-fig backflipping off of Captain America's shield to take out a number of the surrounding enemies.
Further on up the cliff face, we run into everyone's favourite Avenger, Iron Man, who's taking on a number of flying enemies all on his lonesome - and while he might appreciate the ego trip of taking both down single-handedly, we decided to lend him a hand, holding a button after smashing some stuff up to build a giant magnet, which sucks in the pair of airborne bad guys, while Tony presumably sets his thrusters to evade so as not to meet the same magnetic demise as his foes. Mere minutes later, Hulk appears, having one of his crazy destructive flip outs - and a team move of a different variety saw Black Widow calming down her explosively tempered boyfriend with a little lullaby, turning him back into the gentle Bruce Banner instead, whom we happened to need to work one of the computer panels to progress. Taking a leaf out of some of the more recent LEGO Ninjago games, each level in LEGO Marvel Avengers has it's own unique set of challenges to try for, which range from simply completing a level, finding all the hidden collectables and collecting a certain number of Lego studs along the way to the more inventive, character and stage-specific objectives.