LEGO Marvel Super Heroes (Xbox One)

LEGO Marvel Super Heroes is my first Lego game on the Xbox One and my third Xbox One completion. It was hard slog in the end but I’ll cover that in the achievement section.

Super Heroes is a massive step up in terms of Lego games and not just because the last game of the genre I played was the despicable LEGO Indiana Jones 2. The first point of note is that the characters are voiced. I didn’t expect this from a LEGO game and this leads nicely into my next plus point. The game has its own storyline!

In a world when all the super heroes can exist without worrying about breaching any copyrights, they have to team up to fight... all the evil super villains in the Marvel Universe. The overarching evil is that the Silver Surfer has turned up again, bringing with him Galactus, the destroyer of worlds. In a related side-plot Doctor Doom, Magneto and Loki are teaming up to create a weapon to take over the world... with hilarious consequences as always because it’s a Lego game.

The graphical overhaul given to the game is also fantastic. I thought that it looked spectacular compared to anything I had played previously, and it feels like a lot of effort has gone into its development. They have over 115 characters to collect, most of which are intricately designed.

In terms of audio, Super Heroes suffers from the same musical issues as all its predecessors in that the music is good for the first five minutes but it is not built to be repeated for hours at a time.

The gameplay is where all of these games fall down and Super Heroes is no different, although compared to Indiana Jones 2 it felt like heaven. The first noticeable fall down was the new flying mechanic. Characters like Iron Man and The Human Torch have the added ability of flight, however this is incredibly difficult to control. If you are flying in a straight line, you can press A to go up and B to go down, however there is an apparent delay between you pressing B and the character actually moving down so this makes the ring races an absolute nightmare. Also their ability to change direction when moving is almost non-existent which is annoying and also not in keeping with their ‘super’ abilities.

There is also the now standard feature of characters getting stuck on scenery which is now part and parcel of any Lego game.

Additional features include a sandbox New York City (because every game has to have a sandbox of New York City these days) and big Lego characters, some of which can transform into their alter egos. Oh, and Spiderman can transform into Peter Parker as well.

The flying mechanic is my biggest bugbear by a long way though. It terms of gameplay annoyances, I don’t think I have anything else to complain about.

Achievements – 45 Achievements – 1,000 Points

There are no missable or secret achievements! This means, by default, there are no secret missable achievements. There are 15 individual levels which all carry their own achievement and there are also the obligatory ‘do x with y character’ achievements. One of these includes smashing up Loki with Hulk in a similar fashion to the Avengers Assemble movie and another for throwing Wolverine with Colossus which is nothing like X-Men: The Last Stand, but I think it was meant to be.

As part of the now standard achievement to get 100% completion, you have to collect gold bricks by doing mini-missions in the sandbox. Some of these missions are escort missions. I hate escort missions at the best of times but these were some of the worst I have seen. The Lego characters you control can move quite fast in the sandbox but the characters you don’t control can’t keep up with you. This makes the escort missions drawn out, slow and annoying.

To be fair, other than striving for 100% there is nothing too out of the ordinary here. The biggest struggle I had was the sheer size of the game. It is the biggest Lego game by far and collecting all of the Mini Kits, Stan Lee in Perils and Sandbox collectibles took me a very long time. The most frustrating aspect of it was the air races but that was a minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of things.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Despite how it might come across in the above, LEGO Marvel Super Heroes was actually sort of fun which was really nice compared to my previous Lego experience. The only downside is that if you are going for 100%, it all gets a bit repetitive and I thought the story missions were quite boring and too long, so replaying them for the Minikits was dull. However, it is still one of the best Lego games and worth a play.