LEGO Marvel’s Avengers Review

Marvel-ous fun?

Another year, another Lego game. With Dimensions taking centre stage, will the ‘traditional’ Lego games see a decline in quality or is this a new lease of life for the long-running series?

Story:

LEGO Marvel’s Avengers, perhaps unsurprisingly, given the name, takes the events of the two Avengers films and puts them into a Lego context. There’s also a few bonus levels based on some of the standalone Marvel feature films that have been released in the last few years featuring the Avengers crew. There’s nothing really new here – some attempts at humour here and there, which I found less frequent and less funny than previous Lego games.

There is a lot of exposition though, even mid-level, which is partly to hide load-times, but is probably also an excuse to try and sell more toys to kids (and adults), but having the characters do more cool stuff that isn’t possible in a gameplay context.

Gameplay:

And unsurprisingly, very little has changed from a gameplay perspective. Lego Avengers is still a puzzle game with light platforming elements and some throwaway combat that kids or adults can enjoy (and enjoy together). Thankfully, I found that the game now has a few more pointers, which makes the puzzles a little less obtuse, by being better at pointing you in the right direction.

Given all of the puzzles are trivial, the finding them/ working out which character to use aspect was always too frustrating in the past, and it’s good to see this being lessened. There are still a few half-hearted attempts to mix things up with vehicle sections; these are universally rubbish if you’ve ever played just about any other game series in the last decade.

Where you can’t criticise is the amount of content on offer. The 12 stages and 3 bonus levels will take between 8-12 hours to complete in story mode; there’s then the free-play stages, which are mostly pretty large, free-play in the story missions, and the usual plethora of collectables and characters to find, which would take even the most dedicated Lego fan dozens of hours to get through on top of the base game.