The Avengers quite literally assemble in this latest
iteration in the Lego series of games from Traveller's Tales & Warner Bros.
Interactive Entertainment, play as all your favourite heroes and a whole host
more as you take on Loki, Hydra, Ultron, and many others in Lego form. The game starts from the beginning of Age of Ultron with the
team going after Loki’s sceptre that has been stolen and taken to a Hydra fortress
in the mountains of Eastern Europe, it gives you control of 2 characters
initially, getting you used to the controls and the team-up attacks that can be
utilised from time to time, as well as guiding you through which type
characters can affect certain elements in the stages, explosives for destroying
obstacles, electricity for powering machinery etc.…
If you’ve played a Lego game before then you get the idea,
smash everything you see to earn studs, solve puzzles and progress through the
story, it is all very much by the books and doesn’t bring anything new to the
table, the only noticeable addition is a pointless scanning facility where your
character scans an area to reveal hidden items and activate machines but I
found it so tedious I really don’t know why they bothered. The game plays like an Avengers greatest hits, flowing
through the events of the Marvel Universe enough to keep the plot together, once
the moments of the films have been completed the game then opens up allowing
you to freely explore New York where you’ll be able to meet new faces with
quests for you or replay story stages with new characters to open new sections
and grab missed collectibles. For me the free-roam element came too late in the game, the big
open world that I enjoyed from Lego Marvel Super Heroes was what I thought we
were going to get in this game, only to find it’s tucked away after you’ve done
hours of linear fight, puzzle, fight, puzzle, fight, it reminded me of Final
Fantasy XIII where it takes a good 10-20 hours to finally reach the open-world “Pulse”
map, depending on how you play of course, but by that point is it really worth
it? All the story cut scenes play like they do in the films albeit
with the signature Lego humour and even feature actual sound clips from the
movies themselves, the problem is that during these sequences not all of the
dialogue from the films is used which can make some elements not make any sense,
and whilst you’re beating up enemies during the stages your character will make
a quip which is taken from the film but the amount of fighting you do means you
will hear these samples over and over again.
The graphics are nice and everything looks as it should, given
that it’s all supposed to look like plastic, however at times it can all get a
bit hectic with so much going on and you’ll often lose track of where you are
or what you’re doing, then more often than not falling off the edge of a stage
or taking damage from an enemy or hazardous level element because you weren’t
sure what you were looking at. It’s not only the number of enemies and destructible objects
that can cause you to lose your way, sometimes the game doesn’t make it obvious
what you’re meant to be doing next and you’ll end up wandering back and forth
trying to beat something up or flicking any switches hoping they provide some
clue about your current objective. What also doesn’t help is when there are terminals or
switches sometimes the detection of your characters positioning is off and you’ll
need to walk away and come back to the item in order to press the button, often
requiring fiddly and minute movements for the game to recognise you’re stood in
the right place and allow you to proceed. A similar thing occurs when you’ll be fighting enemies or
destroying scenery and a hint icon appears next to where you are, 9 times out
of 10 you’ll accidentally hit the icon causing a message box to appear on screen
interrupting the action and requiring you to press a button to exit out of it,
I found this massively irritating as it always ruined the flow of what I was
doing and was usually a hint at something I already knew and completely
irrelevant to what I was doing. Now I don’t want it to seem like I’m completely unhappy with LEGO Marvel's Avengers, it was enjoyable playing through the movies most of the
time, all the music is there too which gives a great atmosphere and the stages
do look almost exactly as they did which helps to make you feel like you’re
actually defending New York against the Chitauri forces or taking down Ultron’s
legions but the negatives did prove almost too jarring for me. At time of writing the Ant-Man DLC content had yet to be
released but does promise a whole new level featuring all the characters from
the film and the chance to fly Ant-Thony, however is only exclusive to PS3
& PS4. Instead of improving on the formula it seems like
Traveller's Tales & Warner Bros have just taken 2013’s LEGO Marvel Super
Heroes, reskinned it slightly and created a few cutscenes, in fact you may as
well go out and grab a copy of that instead, you’ll recognise more of the
characters, the story is there in among the open-world and at this point it’ll
be a lot cheaper than this latest half-effort.
LEGO Marvel's Avengers is out now on PS4, Xbox One, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii U, PlayStation Vita, Nintendo 3DS, & Windows