The best thing about LEGO Marvel Super Heroes is that it delivers almost everything a Marvel fan could want. From Abomination to the Wizard, this game is an A-to-Z (well, A-to-W) love letter to the Marvel Universe that starts with the Silver Surfer gliding across the title screen and ends with a credits song that could not have been better chosen. A few technical glitches and some carryovers from the franchise history keep it from being an outright masterpiece, but it easily ranks as one of the best superhero games I've played in years. It starts with the characters. Where LEGO Batman 2 offers a sizable roster of heroes and villains, the campaign in LEGO Marvel delivers more playable heroes in a much more coherent story about collecting cosmic bricks around the world before villains do. The first mission starts with Iron Man and Hulk, but the selection of playable characters soon grows to include the rest of the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, loads of X-Men, and even Spider-Man. You'll even switch heroes mid-way through many of the missions, with Cyclops and Jean Grey rescuing Storm and Iceman during an assault on the X-Mansion, or the Human Torch flying in to assist Black Widow and Hawkeye as they infiltrate a Hydra base.
The entrances and exits are all handled as part of the story, which gives you a chance to play several characters who all feel like they're part of a single narrative. The same is true of the villains. You can start by chasing Doctor Octopus from the Baxter Building to the Daily Bugle, but you'll soon be flying off to thwart Dr. Doom's plans in Latveria and taking the Rainbow Bridge to stop Loki from stirring up the frost giants in Asgard. I particularly liked how each mission played out as a sort of protracted chase, with the heroes in pursuit of folks like Magneto or the Red Skull, while battling lots of lesser villains like Pyro or the Leader along the way. As great as it all is, telling such an earth-shattering story without major characters like Dr. Strange or Sub-Mariner present feels off. Still, when a game features lesser-known characters like Black Bolt, Captain Britain and HERBIE, it's hard to complain. Maybe they're saving Kang and Ultron for a sequel? The puzzles in the LEGO games are almost always solved by matching the right power to the right problem, and the Marvel take on this mechanic is particularly inventive.
Take Black Widow for example. She, like Invisible Woman, can spoof security cameras, but Widow also has the acrobatic skill of Captain America, which enables her to access remote areas of the levels, and the brains of Tony Stark, which lets her use certain consoles that would be off limits to other heroes. Throw in a gun, and you've got a very useful character made up of a number of different power sets. Storm and Thor, for instance, can both use electricity to power up stations, but Thor can smash open walls while Storm can put out fires. Even though there are only maybe a couple dozen powers to share among them all, the various combinations of powers ensures that no one feels entirely redundant. You will get a few power sets that seem a bit out of place; Captain America's ubiquitous shield switches seem a little arbitrary, as does the notion that Wolverine should be really good at digging and climbing. There are also a few that make sense but aren't particularly well implemented. The special sixth sense shared by characters like Spider-Man, Wolverine, and Daredevil is really more for recognizing what walls you can climb than for keeping those characters out of danger.
I finished the main campaign in under 12 hours, but I've been coming back to collect extra characters and bricks for days after. In between missions, there's a massive open-world map of Manhattan to explore, from the Statue of Liberty and Battery Park to the X-Mansion up past Harlem. There's also the massive SHIELD Helicarrier floating over the East River. The city has loads of attractions, complete with characters to collect and challenges to beat. Over the course of the side missions, you'll help Heimdall take out frost giants on the docks, battle Sentinels in the streets, or take control of a neglectful boyfriend's mind and make him climb the Empire State Building to apologize to his girlfriend. Experienced gamers won't find many of the open-world puzzles and challenges to be much of a contest; for the most part, you'll simply need to identify the type of task you're facing and then just go hit the right steps in the right order. It's clear that the challenges are aimed at LEGO’s young demographic, so gamers craving a challenge will be let down here.
Still, if the allure of putting Daredevil on a motorcycle and having him race Ghost Rider through the Upper West Side sounds fun, the difficulty is sort of incidental. The rare exceptions are the timed challenges, or those that require you to search out objectives that aren't in the immediate vicinity of the challenge. The biggest pain is the inconsistent, confusing flight system. It attempts to use the same control scheme from the missions where the up and down motion of the thumbstick moves your character toward or away from the camera. Now you'll use face buttons to control the pitch of your character's flight. The problem is that the button you use to ascend is also the button you use to accelerate, and I frequently found myself flying into the side of buildings or massively overshooting my objective. Even with a week or so of playing, it still seems weird to me. Even with that one chief complaint, there's just so much to love about LEGO Marvel that I've been playing it a few hours a day for over a week now and am still finding new charms.
From unlocking Gwen Stacy and making her jump off the Brooklyn Bridge to watching the heroes dance at Tony Stark's house parties, this game is full of the moments that make Marvel one of the best brands in entertainment. LEGO Marvel Super Heroes is the best thing to happen to Marvel games since 2006's Marvel Ultimate Alliance. It's a warm and witty, multi-layered approach to the brand that ties in hundreds of Marvel's most iconic characters, settings, and stories. While you can knock out the campaign story in around eight hours, the world is rich with content, and I've found myself up late every night for the past week playing for "just one more hour." It may not offer the challenge or player-driven context of this year's other open-world games, but those games would be hard-pressed to deliver as much fun and happiness as you'll find in Traveler's Tales latest. The second Lego Marvel game is based on the movies more than the comics, but does that make for a better game? There has, as you may have noticed, been a lot of Lego games in the last few years.
And although some have barely scraped along we can honestly say that we’ve enjoyed them all. Usually it’s the licence that’s made the most difference to their quality, with movies such as Pirates Of The Caribbean and Jurassic World barely fitting the template started by the Star Wars games. Superheroes should, and have in the past, worked perfectly, but not this time… Lego Marvel Super Heroes was released in 2013, and it remains probably our favourite of the Lego games. Last year’s Lego Dimensions was another good one, but as a toys-to-life game it only had three playable characters by default, whereas Marvel’s Avengers has over 200. But Dimensions compensated for this with more involved puzzles, the franchises’ best boss battles, and the developer’s obvious thrill at being able to play with so many iconic franchises at once. Given the many obscure references we’re sure the team behind this new game are just as passionate about Marvel, but that only goes so far when working under weighty new restrictions.
Unlike the first game, Marvel’s Avengers is based primarily on the Marvel Cinematic Universe and not the comics in general. And that means no X-Men, no Fantastic Four, and – despite the recent deal with Sony Pictures – no Spider-Man. Weirdly there’s not even any Guardians of the Galaxy, with a post credits sequence instead implying that might be the basis for the next Marvel game after this. So what you get instead is lengthy recreations of the two Avengers movies and much shorter vignettes based on the two Captain America films, Iron Man 3, and Thor: The Dark World. An Ant-Man level is day one free DLC for the PlayStation 3 and 4, and there’s a character pack due for Captain America: Civil War later in the spring, but that’s it. Why some of the earlier films were missed out we don’t know, especially given the haphazard way the game goes about threading its narrative. The game starts with the opening to Age of Ultron, then skips back to telling the entirety of Avengers Assemble, before going back to the second film and unlocking the other levels.
Voice clips from the movies are used for most of the story elements, but, much like Lego Jurassic World, they sound like they’ve been recorded straight off the TV. So not only do you have to listen to the same muffled snippets again and again but developer TT Games has far less scope to record its own jokes and dialogue. We’re not sure if being based on the movies is something that was imposed by Marvel or if Warner Bros. just thought that was the best way to distinguish this from the last game, but it comes across as unnecessarily restrictive; especially given the lack of innovation in the gameplay. The simple puzzles and fixed camera level design are the same as any other Lego title, and the last game already featured most variations of superpowers. The only thing that’s really changed here is the combat system, and it’s done so for the worse. With anyone but a super-strength character (Thor and above) it takes a tediously long time to beat up even the lowliest grunt.
These atypically effective opponents often attack in swarms and yet many heroes don’t have a proper area attack to deal with crowds. Instead, what the game wants you to do is to initiate a single button QTE, whereupon you have to wait a couple of seconds while your hero goes through a canned animation routine to defeat the enemy. You get tired of this on the second or third go and quickly begin to wish you could just turn off the enemies – since you can’t die anyway – or just be the Hulk all the time. What saves the game from disaster is what has for a long time been the best bit of most of these Lego games: the open world environments. Although even here Marvel’s Avengers comes up short as its biggest one is just a slightly rejigged version of Manhattan from the last game. The flying controls when in the city have been greatly improved though, so that zooming about as Iron Man and the rest is now more of a pleasure than a pain. There are a number of other smaller hubs based on things such as Hawkeye’s homestead and Asgard, and in all these you can pursue a wide range of simple fetch quests, races, and mini-games – as you try to unlock extra vehicles and characters.
There are 100 heroes and villains that have never been in a Lego game before, and we confess we didn’t recognise half of them. However, we were cheered to see personal favourite Squirrel Girl given a surprising amount of exposure, as well as other fan favourites such as Ms. Marvel, Devil Dinosaur, and Fin Fang Foom. These non-movie characters are all good fun but they’re little more than icing on a disappointingly stale cake. The truth is this is not only a worse game than Marvel Super Heroes but it’s also not as worthy a tribute to the comics or the films. In Short: Focusing on the movies rather than the comics has seen Marvel go from inspiring the best Lego game to one of the worst. Pros: Lots of content and the open world Manhattan is a lot of fun to explore, especially with flying characters. Some amusingly obscure cameos. Cons: Far too similar to Marvel Super Heroes, especially as almost all the differences are negative – especially the tedious new combat and limited pool of characters.