For the fans, but even so... not great
| Platform | OVERALL |
|---|---|
| Wii U | 7.00 |
| Overall | 7.00 |
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As someone whose first jaunt into the Lego gaming world was Lego City, Lego Marvel comes off as a huge letdown. I have played many Lego demos for other games like Lego Batman and Hobbit and never really got into them or liked them that much. I was under the mistaken belief that since Lego marvel had an open world it would be like Lego City but it's fundamentally different in a number of ways that make it a vastly less entertaining game to play. For a start, it's a different developer, TT Fusion made Lego City, they are the portable Lego devs whilst Travellers Tales do most of the big Lego games including Marvel. Crucially here the open world is fairly boring in Lego marvel. In City you couldn't walk 5 metres without having something to do or collect, here the city feels devoid of things to do. The open world here is not built for verticality or platforming as city was. And in any case the ability to fly as your favourite superhero pretty much negates all platforming anyway. You can fly anytime you want, as high as you want for as long as you want. Instead of spotting an ascent run and clambering to the top of a building prince of Persia style you just hold down B and watch as your character floats up, and bam you're there. Cars are pointless too, imagine a GTA style game where you never needed to drive? Where your main character could run or fly as fast as a car? It makes jumping into a vehicle pointless. There are some pilotwings style flying levels but the controls are inadequate for purpose you will mainly avoid them. There is no challenge, there is no fun. Not to mention that you can barely do anything in the open world until you unlock all the characters. So I went through the campaign just to have all the needed characters to do the open world justice. Even when that was done there is no joy, no incentive, no fun in tooling around the open world. It serves no purpose. Not to mention the frame rate in the open world is consistently spotty. In City, there would be odd moments with slowdown, here it's just under what you want it to be all the time so it' far more aggravating. But inexplicably the frame rate gets better the further you are into the game, even if it's the same city - which is inexplicable. The campaign levels are boring Bond Villain Lair repeats again and again and again. The camera is zoomed out too far, as the whole game seems made for multiplayer and this is another problem, lots of characters, sometimes spotty A.I and a bad character switching method. Sometimes characters will not follow you meaning you have to trudge through bits of a level you have already done as a second character. The character switching is also fucked up in the open world, sometimes you are limited to 2 characters even though you need someone else to do something, tough luck. You can go to a station to use other people but then sometimes the indicator and marker for the next campaign disappears! Also there are sooo many characters here the game has to bring up a grid of icons which looks like a marvellously convoluted game of Connect 4. The campaign also forces you from one campaign mission to the next, with no break in between for open world shenanigans. It becomes exceedingly tiring playing several of these Bond Lairs one after the other. One must also mention the humour or complete lack of. There are jokes which are not even jokes. You cannot even qualify some of the stuff said here as jokes. It's like watching a comedy film that never makes you laugh and is an utter failure in that respect. Considering the wealth of characters and history in the Marvel universe this is an untapped goldmine. The writer here has utterly failed on all levels. But there is some entertainment to have with the game. Despite the repetition there are a couple of good missions, fighting in the X-Men Mansion is fun as is Asgard. And whoever did the voice casting has done a great job recruiting just about every cartoon voice actor for the superhero shows and getting them to voice the same character in the game. As an animation nerd, I got a thrill from hearing some familiar voices. There is also some satisfaction playing as the superheroes, bombing around as the Hulk for instance or flying the skies as Iron Man. And most of their powers are recreated in a solid, workable yet simple style. However as a whole it has soured me considerably on Lego games. If you haven't played City because you assumed it was like the rest of the Lego games then think again - it's different and it's better. |
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Posted by gamingeek Tue, 14 Jan 2014 12:24:55
Recently Spotted:
*crickets*
Most lego games have you break lots of stuff to build new things needed for level progression but it's taken to such an extreme here you will get exasperated having to break that one tiny little last object that you never thought of, just to progress in the game.
Not better than Witcher 2.
7.0
This review comes off way worse than a 7.
When I said there is no fun to be had I was talking about the open world. The campaign missions have some fun.
Another thing, there are sidequests if you can call them that, where you walk up to an npc and "talk" to them, only they talk, your character doesn't and the resulting fetch quest always results in you following a glowing line to one point and then back.
The combat is all controller mashing. The combat in lego city is like the Batman games only simpler but you have a simple fight then you are free to explore the levels in the campaign. This Marvel game is about assaulting you continually with bad guys whilst doing puzzles at the same time so it can get annoying. Even though it's never really hard.