After the roaring success that was Lego Lord of the Rings, we were all dreadfully excited when we heard about about Lego’s newest game based on the heroes and villains of Marvel. Released in October last year, we got it just after Christmas and I finished it (well the main storyline anyway) around a week ago.
I must say, I am very very conflicted when it comes to this game. It is entertaining? Well, yes, for a certain amount of time for a certain kind of person. Is it good? In some respects, but nowhere near as good as the LOTR game and in general has some pretty big flaws.
Okay, so you play through as numerous good guys (such as Iron Man, Wolverine, Mr Fantastic etc) trying to defeat bad guys. This
all starts when the Silver Surfer appears to herald the coming of Galactus, but his board is destroyed by Doctor Doom and cosmic bricks are scattered across the world. Doom and Loki want to gather the bricks to create a Doom Ray to destroy Galactus, but Nick Fury gathers together all the good guys to try and stop them.
So the plot line isn’t exactly based on a comic of anything, it’s just as many well known Marvel characters as possible in one game. The levels themselves are pretty standard, the sort of stuff we’ve come to expect from any Lego game, with a couple of amusing moments in between. In each level you have the usual objectives; ‘true believer’ for collecting a certain amount of coins, 10 minikits for completing little challenges during free play, red ‘deadpool’ bricks for unlocking extras in the wider world and the Marvel specific ‘Stan Lee in peril’ where in every level Marvel creator Stan Lee will be in some sort of trouble and you need to save him. So there’s a lot to be doing in each level, and because you need various different powers it prompts you to play through in free play so you can unlock everything. And you see, that is what made LOTR such a great game, I wanted to get that 100% complete badge shining on the screen and I didn’t mind having to walk Middle Earth or do levels two or three times to get it.
But my Marvel completion currently stands at around 34% – and I really couldn’t care less about increasing it. I’ve done the main story and a bit of wandering about in New York collecting a few things but it has become utterly boring now that the story is complete. There are quite a few things that have caused this, so I’ll try to work through them quickly.
First off is the fact that everything becomes the same. Yes the first time you have to pull a series of levers to open a door to get a brick is very interesting but by the 50th time (there are 250 golden bricks in total) it begins to get tedious. Finding everything in New York would take someone who really doesn’t mind repetitive actions, because there are very limited actions that you can do to obtain these bricks. I get the creators wanted to make the game as fulfilling as possible, hence there being so many bricks, but 150 would easily have been enough.
Something that links into this is also the sheer amount of characters that they’ve tried to include.There are 155 playable characters (in LOTR there were only 84) and this was really pushed as a fantastic thing when it came to this new Lego game. Imagine the possibilities when it comes to all those characters – we’re talking a pretty hefty chunk of the Marvel universe and some of them even I hadn’t heard of before. But, in reality, there are only about ten abilities that the characters have, just repeated across the entire group. One or two have unique abilities (such as Ant Man who can shrink down), but on the whole there are these ten main abilities and each character has around two. This means that once you unlock the main cast (who you naturally unlock as you play the main story) you can pretty much do everything you need to without needing to unlock the secondary characters. Also once you unlock the flying characters, you can simply skip the majority of the puzzles by simply flying to the top of the building.
The mechanisms for flying are another big problem for me, they are so damn clunky and bizarre that winning races is nearly impossible in some cases. With the vehicles they don’t fly like an aeroplane would, but they don’t fly like a helicopter either. You have to point straight up to go up, there’s not really just a happy glide at any point. The flying characters are just as difficult to manoeuvre, with A making them soar straight up and B having them plummet to the ground. The forced perspective with the camera also doesn’t help, as sometimes you end up inside buildings desperately trying to navigate someone who’s still outside of the building.
The way you change characters is also infuriating, because they have decided to put the main characters first, followed by the 
secondary characters in alphabetical order. Okay, so far so good. But most of the main characters and a few secondary have more than one outfit or incarnation, so for example Tony Stark, Iron Man, Mark 42 or Jean Grey, Phoenix etc. Each of these usually do slightly different things, so if you want to use the Mark 42 suit you have to wait for the computer to scroll itself through seven different iterations of Iron Man before reaching the one you want. Considering how many times you have to change character, this can get real boring, real quick. Add into this the fact that if you’re Hulk or Spiderman, when you press Y you change into your alter ego and go through that whole animation, and then the character screen opens. The LOTR way of doing this of having a wheel of your favourites would’ve made this process a lot less painful, because you just have the main abilities that you need to complete a task and pretty much ignore the rest of the characters. I honestly don’t understand why they felt the need to include so many characters, especially when the majority of the wider world won’t know (or care) who they are.
Something they’ve taken out from the LOTR game was the Mithril bricks which you could then use to forge interesting or funny items, such as the Mithril Disco Vial which made everyone boogie round the place. These really added another dimension into the whole game, and there is nothing like this whatsoever in the Marvel game. It wouldn’t be difficult to come up with some cool items that you could create, and it’d break up the monotony of the game.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, this just isn’t as funny. It has a few amusing moments (usually provided by Deadpool) but past that it’s just dull, considering the running joke is Nick Fury constantly eating, the humour doesn’t exactly come thick and fast. Mix this with voices that sound almost right and the whole game just falls a bit flat, which is a shame considering how good it could have been.
So, what to do. If you can give it a go then do but I wouldn’t spend money on it (especially not the full whack of £35) because it’s simply not worth it.
northernfool 