It’s New York Comic Con week, which is always an exciting time of the year. However, this year it’s especially exciting for us as we finally get to reveal a little bit more about LEGO Marvel’s Avengers on PS4, PS3, and PS Vita. We’ve been busy in the studio working hard on the game, but NYCC is our time to assemble (see what I did there) and Hulk Smash! From the very start of the project, we wanted the game to be more than just the two amazing Avengers movies featuring our favorite Marvel Super Heroes. As such, we not only focused on retelling the fantastic story of The Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron, but went deeper into everything related to the Avengers past and present. We’re now able to reveal that we have playable content in the game that focuses on Captain America: The First Avenger, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Iron Man 3 and Thor: The Dark World, which allows us to squeeze all sorts of fun gameplay, jokes, and characters into a terrific package of a videogame.
We’re all huge fans of the Marvel Universe here at TT Games, so we’ve definitely gone to town with what we’re putting into the game on the Marvel Cinematic and Comic side. We want to make sure that LEGO Marvel’s Avengers is a videogame that appeals to anyone who has the slightest attraction to Marvel and their amazing characters, so we’ve made sure that our roster is second to none. We’re including all of the characters from both Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron, of course, and then delving into the comic books for our fun free play. Players will be able to enjoy the main story, explore our reimagination of LEGO Manhattan, experience places like Asgaard, Washington DC, Malibu, Barton Farm, and much more. The entire development team at TT and our inspirational partners at Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment, Marvel, and LEGO, are really trying to outdo ourselves with this game. We’re crafting the most authentic and fun Avengers experience possible while ensuring that there are surprises around every corner… and we mean every corner.
Hold on tight, January 26th, 2016 can’t come soon enough! PlayStation PlusLittleBigPlanet 3 and Not a Hero are February's free PS Plus games. Zero DawnOnly on PS4. MLB The Show 17The Kid is back. Learn about our biggest and best The Show yet. keep writing about the “Lego” games? Reviews, features, news stories. The fact is that they’re omnipresent. Not writing about them is like a sports writer not writing about the Yankees. For while you can’t yet buy a “Little Big Planet” or “Uncharted” game for your PS4, you can buy THREE Lego games—“Lego The Hobbit,” “Lego Marvel Super Heroes,” and “The Lego Movie Videogame”—and a fourth is coming soon in the form of “Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham.” We already wrote about Lego games we’d like to see (and one has come to fruition since writing that piece) but what about how to choose the best of what’s already available. With over four dozen Lego games overall and 16 licensed Lego games in the console generation, it’s getting overwhelming.
Which ones are the best? Let us count them down, in chronological order. Lego Star Wars: The Video Game (2005-PS2) The one that really started it all has held up remarkably well almost a decade later (yes, that makes me feel old too). “Lego Star Wars” tapped a generation right in its nostalgic heart, blending both the way that so many people feel about their favorite childhood toys and their favorite childhood movies. Wait, we can use the toys of our youth to recreate our favorite flicks? Where do we sign up? And the merging of Lucas concepts like The Force and building with Legos proved addictive. It actually made a degree of sense, unlike so many other nostalgic mash-ups. “Lego Star Wars” was one of those rare games that instantly heralded a multi-year franchise. You played it for an hour and you knew that someone who deserved a raise had really opened a toy box that would keep giving for years. It all started here. And it’s still so incredibly playable, unlike many games of its era.
Sadly, a few of its immediate predecessors focused too heavily on gadgets in their puzzle solving and remained in the shadow of this game and the “Original Trilogy” follow-up and so “Lego Batman” and “Lego Indiana Jones” were near-misses. The series wouldn’t really connect creatively again until… Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4; As with many of the best “Lego” games, the success of this one is ably assisted by the depth of the world that inspired its creation. J.K Rowling crafted such a fascinating universe that one could argue she did most of the work in terms of making this game a success. Just as George Lucas’ universe made a natural fit with Lego, so did the world of the boy who lived, a kid who used magic to solve problems in much the same way Lego aficionados create with their favorite toys. And another element that often distinguishes a hit Lego game was in place here as well with the deep character roster provided by the Rowling books and films. It wasn’t just a movie tie-in, it was a new way to play within the universe and stories of your favorite fictional franchise.
Lego Pirates of the Caribbean: The Video Game (2011-PS3) Again, the depth of the universe helps and the “Pirates of the Caribbean” games offered the developers at Traveller’s Tales a chance to provide gamers with a wide array of gameplay. What I dug about “PoTC” more than most critics was the way it expanded the universe of the games by focusing on collectibles in a new way. Lego games are always about smashing things and grabbing things and pirates do a lot of both. This game also really expanded on the idea that different playable characters would have different strengths, weaknesses, and powers, resulting in more replay value than many other Lego games. Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars (2011-PS3) It all comes back around. While I’m one of the people who likes to consider the “Star Wars” universe closed as of the ‘80s and mostly can’t stand anything that has come out since the original trilogy ended, this game was shockingly fun. The folks at TT found a way to bring some of the magic of those first movies and the original Lego game into the new Lucasverse in ways that the creators of “Attack of the Clones” and the awful “The Clone Wars” movie failed to do.