LEGO Marvel Super Heroes Review

The best thing about LEGO Marvel Super Heroes is that it delivers almost everything a Marvel fan could want. From Abomination to the Wizard, this game is an A-to-Z (well, A-to-W) love letter to the Marvel Universe that starts with the Silver Surfer gliding across the title screen and ends with a credits song that could not have been better chosen. A few technical glitches and some carryovers from the franchise history keep it from being an outright masterpiece, but it easily ranks as one of the best superhero games I've played in years.

It starts with the characters. Where LEGO Batman 2 offers a sizable roster of heroes and villains, the campaign in LEGO Marvel delivers more playable heroes in a much more coherent story about collecting cosmic bricks around the world before villains do. The first mission starts with Iron Man and Hulk, but the selection of playable characters soon grows to include the rest of the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, loads of X-Men, and even Spider-Man. You'll even switch heroes mid-way through many of the missions, with Cyclops and Jean Grey rescuing Storm and Iceman during an assault on the X-Mansion, or the Human Torch flying in to assist Black Widow and Hawkeye as they infiltrate a Hydra base. The entrances and exits are all handled as part of the story, which gives you a chance to play several characters who all feel like they're part of a single narrative.

The same is true of the villains. You can start by chasing Doctor Octopus from the Baxter Building to the Daily Bugle, but you'll soon be flying off to thwart Dr. Doom's plans in Latveria and taking the Rainbow Bridge to stop Loki from stirring up the frost giants in Asgard. I particularly liked how each mission played out as a sort of protracted chase, with the heroes in pursuit of folks like Magneto or the Red Skull, while battling lots of lesser villains like Pyro or the Leader along the way. As great as it all is, telling such an earth-shattering story without major characters like Dr. Strange or Sub-Mariner present feels off. Still, when a game features lesser-known characters like Black Bolt, Captain Britain and HERBIE, it's hard to complain. Maybe they're saving Kang and Ultron for a sequel?

The puzzles in the LEGO games are almost always solved by matching the right power to the right problem, and the Marvel take on this mechanic is particularly inventive. LEGO Marvel Super Heroes offers an original storyline in which Nick Fury calls upon heroes spanning the Marvel Universe to save Earth from such threats as the vengeance of Loki and the hunger of Galactus, Devourer of the Worlds. 

You will get a few power sets that seem a bit out of place; Captain America's ubiquitous shield switches seem a little arbitrary, as does the notion that Wolverine should be really good at digging and climbing. There are also a few that make sense but aren't particularly well implemented. The special sixth sense shared by characters like Spider-Man, Wolverine, and Daredevil is really more for recognizing what walls you can climb than for keeping those characters out of danger.

In between missions, there's a massive open-world map of Manhattan to explore, from the Statue of Liberty and Battery Park to the X-Mansion up past Harlem. There's also the massive SHIELD Helicarrier floating over the East River. The city has loads of attractions, complete with characters to collect and challenges to beat. Over the course of the side missions, you'll help Heimdall take out frost giants on the docks, battle Sentinels in the streets, or take control of a neglectful boyfriend's mind and make him climb the Empire State Building to apologize to his girlfriend.

The biggest pain is the inconsistent, confusing flight system. It attempts to use the same control scheme from the missions where the up and down motion of the thumbstick moves your character toward or away from the camera. Now you'll use face buttons to control the pitch of your character's flight. The problem is that the button you use to ascend is also the button you use to accelerate, and I frequently found myself flying into the side of buildings or massively overshooting my objective. Even with a week or so of playing, it still seems weird to me.

Even with that one chief complaint, there's just so much to love about LEGO Marvel that I've been playing it a few hours a day for over a week now and am still finding new charms. From unlocking Gwen Stacy and making her jump off the Brooklyn Bridge to watching the heroes dance at Tony Stark's house parties, this game is full of the moments that make Marvel one of the best brands in entertainment.