Lego Marvel's Avengers Review

Avengers Assemble: Brick by Brick!

You'd think by now many folks would be bored of the Lego games, but they're not. These games have a charm for kids and adults alike, they're easy to pick up and play and some of the puzzles have been pretty fiendish over the years. They've covered the likes of Batman, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and more with the best one (for me) being Lego Marvel Super Heroes at the time, but the more and more I've spent with the latest game from the Lego stable has dethroned it at long last.

It might not have all the characters you know and love, because it's set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (whereas the previous Marvel game had its own storyline and was a Marvel comics fan's dream), but Lego Marvel's Avengers manages to take the previous Lego Marvel and expand/iterate on it in terms of gameplay with only a few irks here and there.

The first irk is that it seems to have lost some of the soul that made the first Marvel game so great, having to bring in content, storylines, and set pieces from the two Avengers movies has somewhat dampened the series usual trademark fun and humour in places.

The second irk kind of ties into the first, the canned sound-bytes from the movies don't quite fit and in some cases they're shoddily presented with a loss of audio fidelity which becomes quite noticeable.

These two things aside, what you have is a really great game, one which becomes even better once you're done with the main storyline. The free roam aspect of Lego Marvel: Superheroes is back and it's been expanded quite considerably.

Not only is Lego Marvel Manhattan back, but there's hubs based on Barton's Farm, Asgard, Sokovia, South Africa, and more drawn from all corners of the MCU. These hubs are rammed with things to do, puzzles to solve, and collectibles to find. There's over 100 new roster characters to unlock, with many never seen before in a Lego game - such as White Tiger (a character many people wanted from the previous game).

The bane of the previous games, races - the good news is that the character movement for flying characters has been tweaked and now it's possible to keep control in the air races, finishing them isn't so much of a trial. I'd say the movement across the board has been tweaked in terms of vehicle control on the ground, water, and air too.

Breaking Blocks!

Ah it's always about the brick punching, breaking things into studs, collecting the glorious amounts of shiny things which pop out and hoarding them to buy more characters, more of everything. This hasn't changed at all, but the punching people and robots has...

The combat system for this one's been tweaked considerably, there's new combos, new moves, and new moves like the Avengers Team-Up where two characters can unleash a devastating special, rather like in Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 1 and 2. These moves are instant enemy death bombs, they'll clear a large area of bad guys and allow you a brief moment of respite to hoover up any studs.

You also have the set piece Avengers: Initiative moves which are usually story based, allowing you to progress further on in.

All in all combat feels fun, fresh, and enjoyable.

With the new characters come new powers (like Quicksilver's speed allowing him to run on water), new ways to do things and one of the things which was missing from the previous Marvel game - Hulk's Super Jump. Yep, you can now leap around like in Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, climb buildings and generally cross Manhattan in a matter of moments with Hulk's jump - and it's awesome fun.

Fing Fan Foom can grow to the size of buildings... not surprising really when you look up information about the character.

Then you have Tony Stark, aka: Iron Man, and another great change to the way things are done. Hold down the character change button, and you'll get an in-helmet HUD appear, from here you can choose the various Iron Man suits you've unlocked at the time and add new ones to the quick-change menu. And yes, the briefcase armour is unlockable!

Fun for hours

This game manages to be fun for hours and hours, it's a blast to pick up and play, grab some new characters, solve new puzzles and experiment with new abilities. Exploring the new areas, fighting with new moves and racking up an impressive amount of Lego Studs to buy all the goodies remains just as cool as it's been with the last games, just as addictive too.

The open world has been expanded, there's now random things going on, usually simple little crimes but the addition of these tiny events has expanded the whole game and provides extra reasons to dive back in since you get substantial stud rewards for completing these mini events and they're fun too.

As per usual you can unlock gold bricks too, build bonus levels and explore secret areas. You can also go to Space at any time via the menu, which opens up a neat mission/fast travel hub select allowing you to choose free roam or story at any unlocked location - major points for this method of doing things!

Finding Stan Lee and rescuing him, unlocking Mini-Kits, Red Bricks and more awaits here in Lego Marvel's Avengers.

Pretty too

It's also a pretty game, runs well on the Xbox One (the version I reviewed) and when there's lots of action the frame-rate remains nice and steady. The game looks better than the previous Lego Marvel with a lot more detail on locations, especially the Shield Hellicarrier which hovers in the sky above Manhattan and acts as a mini-Hub in its own right.

There's something visually cool about a lil' Lego Iron Man zipping around the skyline at high speed, something makes me want a proper Iron Man game and not a couple of movie tie-ins or lacklustre attempts... especially now I've played this and been saving people as Stark for the last few hours to build up enough studs to buy a new cool red brick to allow me to collect even more studs!

The bottom line then, not quite as charming as the previous Marvel game, but in many ways a lot better and when the humour hits, it hits just right. It iterates on the previous games and manages to add even more to the game systems, especially when it comes to movement.

Well worth it!

Thanks to Warner, and Stature PR for sending the review copy our way!