Avengers Assemble…Lego Pieces…
The story revolves around the Silver Surfer crashing into Earth and Marvel’s super villains collecting the “Cosmic Bricks” from the crash, expect cameos from Dr Doom, Magneto, Mystique, Doc Ock, Sandman and Whiplash to name a few. The typical Lego humour is there as you would expect and comes with hilarious voice-acting and animation like the past few games.
As in recent Lego games, its open-world with story-based levels thrown in. Before it was Lego City and Middle-Earth, now it’s Manhattan. As you would expect, there are plenty of objects to smash, build and items to collect that are scattered throughout the city and the levels. Each Marvel character has their own ability, like Spider-Man can detect climbable walls and levers to pull with his webs using his spidey sense, Hulk can pick up and throw heavy objects and return to Bruce Banner, Iron Man can fly and launch rockets while others can use paranormal abilities to help.
It should come as no real surprise that the PS4 version of Lego Marvel Super Heroes isn’t all that different from its PS3 counterpart, it has the same content, same levels, characters, overworld and collectables. It misses an opportunity to use the touchpad for anything other than a tap button for the map and the only real upgrade is to the visuals, making the Lego characters more shiny and reflective while being able to have further draw distances and handling more Lego pieces on screen, all while in 1080p at 60fps. There was a comment from a member of TT Games that load times were gone, sadly that’s not the case…but they are reduced dramatically.
If there’s a problem with Lego Marvel Super Heroes, it’s that the typical Lego formula still hasn’t changed all that much. You still have to complete the story mode to unlock more characters to replay it and find the collectables scattered through the levels and main hub. It’s still fun to do and chances are it always will be, but I’d like to see TT Games take some risks and there’s none to be found here.
The Verdict
Lego Marvel Super Heroes provides the Marvel experience that fans have been dreaming of. It’s funny, authentic to the franchises and is a joy to play. I can’t fault it for anything other than playing it a bit safe, other than that it’s probably the best Lego game to date and worth picking up if you love comic book superheroes. I wish they had put a real reason for gamers to want a next-gen version, if only something small like an exclusive level or character instead of shinier visuals and a smoother framerate, but despite that it’s well worth grabbing regardless of what platform its on.
