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.]At last, I’m free to speak about one of the most exciting things that we’ve been squirreling away on at TT Games for LEGO Marvel’s Avengers, outside of everything that already makes the game such a fun and authentic Marvel title (Yes, Squirrel Girl reference intended… sorry!). LEGO Marvel’s Avengers is getting some free DLC content exclusively for all PS4 and PS3 players. What’s even more awesome is that this content is based on the brilliant Marvel’s Ant-Man movie and also one of my most anticipated films of 2016, Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War. And yes, believe it or not I’ve managed to keep a lid on this. I’m not quite sure how… but I have. LEGO Marvel’s Avengers already features content from six epic Marvel films (and a plethora of content from the rest of the Marvel Universe, including a ton of characters from Marvel Comics), however, now PlayStation gamers will be able to add content from two more movies to their experience.
So, I hear you all asking: what is this content exactly, and what makes it so exciting? Well, first up we have the Captain America: Civil War Character Pack, which will be available at launch on January 26th and includes nine characters — yes, nine characters — featured in the upcoming movie: Captain America, Iron Man (Mark 46 armor), Black Panther, Winter Soldier, Falcon, War Machine, Scarlet Witch and my personal favorites, Crossbones and Agent 13. It’s a great pack that will hopefully get everyone as excited as I am about the film. Obviously before you ask, yes, you will be able to take all of these characters into the main game, into the various levels or into the eight different open world locations. The second is the Ant-Man Character & Level Pack, of course based on the Ant-Man movie, which will be available later this spring. This pack features an awesome level based on a section of the film. It also has eleven great characters, including Ant-Man (Scott Lang), Ant-Man (Hank Pym), Ant-Thony (Flying Ant), Cassie Lang, Darren Cross, Scott Lang, Hank Pym, Hope Van Dyne, Luis, The Wasp (Janet Van Dyne), and Yellowjacket.
We are really bringing Ant-Man and Yellowjacket to life with all the abilities that you’d expect them to have. The team and I here at TT Games are positive you will really enjoy this DLC offering. But, not only are we bringing you the characters and the level content, the part of this pack I’m most excited about… You’ll be able to fly around on Ant-Thony within the DLC level and then into the main game as well. When I watched the movie with the team, we really enjoyed it, so much so that I went back to watch it again the next day, and then saw the amazing playsets that LEGO created for the film so to now be able to pair those together and bring them to life in LEGO Marvel’s Avengers is yet another reason why this game has been an absolute delight to work on. In addition to the movie and comic content in the game, we’re really looking forward to hearing what you all think of the many new features in LEGO Marvel’s Avengers, specifically the Avengers Team-Ups. When you think of the Avengers, you think of teamwork, pulling together against adversity as a team.
So, now you can team-up characters to perform incredible combo moves to take down the bad guys. Teaming up core Avengers results in unique moves based on the pairing so we hope you enjoy trying out all of the various combinations to see which is your favorite. For us, it’s yet another reason why LEGO Marvel’s Avengers has been such a pleasure to develop. All of us on the team here are Marvel fans so make sure you look out for the various references and nods we’ve put into the game to make it the most authentic and fun experience. We think that this is our best game yet — more humor, more characters, more features, more open world gameplay, more abilities, and of course, more movie content exclusively for PlayStation fans. On behalf of myself and the team, we hope you have many hours of enjoyment when you play LEGO Marvel’s Avengers, and if you love it as much as we think you will, keep an eye out for the season pass content that we’ll be bringing your way featuring classic comic content as well as content from Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.