I really wanted this game to be great. Lego Marvel Super Heroes (the predecessor to this game) was a slightly flawed, but delightfully enchanting entry in the Lego X franchise, with it’s capacity for whimsy, huge cast of Marvel Characters and a whole island of Manhattan to have characters like Spiderman and Hulk fight and wander over.
Lego Avengers is in many ways a step back.
The fun core of the game is still there,complete missions,complete mini challenges based on character powers, collect studs, unlock characters to use in the free roam sections, repeat till 100% complete. In fact, credit has to go to some of the choices, Ms Marvel in particular is very well realised, with some truly great animations.
There’s also credit due in the open world areas, now expanded into movie specific mini zones as well as the much loved New York. However, some of the character and location omissions are baffling and odd.
The problem is, while the previous game had the Marvel Comics license and proceeded to run the gamut of the whole pantheon of characters, with Lego Avengers, the stable is much more limited. No Spiderman characters. No X Men or mutants at all. And no Fantastic Four. (There’s even an oddly captioned “Human Torch: Original” character to make this absence more clear) Even the map has changed, with non MCU locations like Oscorp stripped from the map.
As a movie based around the MCU, this makes sense, I don’t particularly appreciate the step back, but I understand. What’s really weird is the lack of Guardians of The Galaxy, or any of their cosmic stuff. Nova appears, likely so that all of the “All New, All Different Avengers” can be in the game. But no Star Lord, no Groot. The only hint is that Thanos is seen listening to a mix tape in the post game stinger. So it’s hard not to think they’ve been held back for this games sequel.
As is tradition for the Lego Games based on films, dialogue is barring a few original sequences for mission descriptions recorded by Hayley Atwell, Clark Gregg and Cobie Smulders. This original writing is some of the best, with witty in jokes about actors and characters and some great gag comedy going on in scenes. When allowed to play around, the writers do fantastically well at snarky jokes. However, the dialogue lifted from the films almost always sounds muffled and very clipped, due to editing decisions, which only goes on to be bothersome over the five or six hour campaign.
For me, an hour of that was in repeating sections, not even for secrets or prizes, but because the game had very rare glitches where event triggers got stuck. So on multiple levels, it was necessary to repeat the opening sections two or more times and just get frustrated playing through.
The whole game just feels tired. There’s sparks of cleverness in the writing and in getting to play with some of the more recently introduced characters, but overall, the problem is that this game is just not as much fun as Marvel Super Heroes. The formula is getting thin, and some measure of shake up might be in order for the future.
Review on the PC version of the game.