LEGO Marvel’s Avengers

Genre: Open-World 3D Action-Platformer

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local)

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Review:

LEGO Marvel’s Avengers is a family-friendly Open-World 3D Action-Platformer released in 2016 on PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Wii U, with a similar but different game bearing the same title released on PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS. This is the second major game in the Traveller’s Tales LEGO franchise to explore the Marvel universe and its characters, and this time it is very specifically exploring the Marvel Cinematic Universe versions of these characters, and in particular the first two Avengers films.

In terms of presentation, that means you’ll be seeing LEGO recreations of scenes from the films in question, and this game uses the music and voice clips from the films too. I feel like this comes across as a bit artificial at times, especially when a character repeats the same three one-liners in battle over and over again, but it’s otherwise decent enough, I suppose.

The same goes for this game’s 3D visuals. At this point, I don’t know what else to say about the graphics in these LEGO games. It’s fine, I guess, but there’s nothing here that impresses, and certainly this franchise doesn’t seem to be getting significantly more graphically detailed as far as I can tell.

In terms of gameplay, you once again have the usual Traveller’s Tales formula of simple action, tearing apart all the stuff in the area around you, and your character using bits of it to build various things to allow them to progress, with extremely simple puzzles thrown in.

There are a few things that are a bit different this time, though, and that is that your characters have finishing moves in combat this time around, as well as combo moves they can use together in designated spots. This is initially a nice addition, but unfortunately, it’s undermined by the constantly-spawning enemies ensuring that combat remains extremely tedious.

What’s more, this game has all kinds of odd bugs where the hit detection for where your character is standing frequently seems to get messed up. At one point, I had one of my characters get stuck in a spot, die, respawn in the same spot, get stuck again, die, and I had to swap to a different character and hope that the NPC could deal with it. Really frustrating.

Also, when it comes to the Open World portion of the game, this stuff is once again annoyingly late into the game, but players are given more open-ended areas to explore, though these are largely just a hub in between the game’s missions.

In the end, I felt that at its best, LEGO Marvel’s Avengers managed to channel the fun of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in LEGO form. But far too often, I felt like I was dealing with bugs, endlessly-spawning enemies that wouldn’t give me a moment’s peace, and other annoyances that sapped the fun out of this experience for me. Unless you’re specifically a fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I suggest you stick with the LEGO Marvel Super Heroes games instead.

tl;dr – LEGO Marvel’s Avengers is yet another game to feature Traveller’s Tales family-friendly LEGO game 3D Action-Platformer formula with some Open-World elements. Unfortunately, the game’s good qualities are undermined by a lot of frustrating bugginess, along with some poor design choices. There’s still a fun game underneath all of this, but you’re much better off getting one of the other LEGO Marvel games.

Grade: C

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