Ever been really excited for a game and then bitterly disappointed with clunky controls, a cut and paste dialogue job and loads of bugs? Then Lego Marvel Avengers is the game you have been waiting for! I am a huge fan of the Lego game series and after hits like Lego Marvel Super Heroes and Lego Batman 3 : Beyond Gotham, I was so pumped for this game to be amazing, yet this may be possibly one of the worst Lego games I have played.
The game starts off with the opening scene from Avengers : Age Of Ultron (and yes is based on the MCU films) I thought there was a bug or I had missed something, but no, this is how the game is meant to be. The rest is told through flashbacks as you zip back and forth between both Avengers movies, both Captain America movies, Iron Man 3 and Thor 2. Instead of being a storytelling masterpiece as most Lego games have been previously, this feels like a confusing mess.
If you can get past this and the persistent bugs that leave your character trapped and force you to restart the level, as well as WAY too mini puzzles that require you to highlight certain areas on a map with the square button (seriously, whose idea was this? ? ?) The game delivers a solid Marvel comic book character hunt that delves into some of the more obscure characters that require a Wikipedia app to identify who they are.
A lot of the environments from Lego Marvel are back and identical, New York City is the same size and still open to exploration (with a lot more quests and characters than the previous instalment!) The SHIELD base is still the same with gold bricks hidden in exactly the same places as the first game, a convenient yet kind of annoying design. Other areas you can explore are Asgard, Sokovia, Washington D.C., Barton’s Farm and Malibu. They are all reasonably well designed and littered with over 200 + playable characters to discover.
This is the part of the game that really impressed me, new favourites like Luke Cage and Jessica Jones aka Jewel are all here waiting to be find, but don’t worry you won’t be seeing them pork or swig back whiskey anytime during the game, they are completely PG – 13 rated and safe for the kids to play. Other obscure characters like Moon Knight and Squirrel Girl are all up for grabs and are significantly different from their Lego Marvel Heroes counterpart. That being said I didn’t need the many different Iron Man suits and marks (seriously one would suffice!) fortunately there is enough Marvel characters to go around in this game to keep the most die hard of fans happy.
One upgrade on the gameplay is the use of special attacks and team up special attacks. When fighting your Lego enemies, a button appears above their head, you press it to match and your character will perform a special move. If you are part of the Avengers and it flashes blue, your character will team up with another Avenger close to you for a high impact take down. A lot of thought and effort has been placed into this side of the game and many different characters having different take downs and moves kept things interesting and made me want to keep using it.
I reviewed this game on the Playstation 4 system and found several bugs littered through the game, so many times my character would jump in the air and fall down a crack and get eternally stuck, forcing me to restart the level and try again, once or twice is ok, but nearly every level this happened in and I found it extremely distracting from the game. That being said the graphics are slick and polished in this version of the Lego Avengers, Lego has never looked better in a video game and this is a massive credit to the game developers.
This game overall just proved to be such a let down for me, I wanted it to be great, especially after the string of hits that Lego has produced before it, and this just felt like a rushed cash in and I am going to say it, this is the worst Lego game adaption ever made. that being said, don’t completely discount the game because of this, the Lego games have an extremely high standard and this one just missed the mark a little bit. Hopefully they can go back to what they did best with my secret fantasy of Lego Marvel VS DC or Lego Batman Vs Superman.
Review by Alaisdair Leith
