Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's... another LEGO game! This time it's LEGO MARVEL's Avengers. And yes, I'm aware that opening line comes from a DC Comics character. But what strikes me the most as someone who's not a huge fan of comic books is just how similar both Marvel's and DC's rosters are. There are blatant rip offs of characters up and down each side. But let's focus on Marvel for now. LEGO MARVEL's Avengers tells the stories of the blockbuster films The Avengers, and The Avengers: Age of Ultron where they team up to defeat Loki and Ultron, respectively.
If you've ever played a LEGO game you know what you're in for. Progress is made through levels by breaking and/or rebuilding things, which is always fun, and there are a mind-boggling amount of collectibles to hunt down. The emphasis of LEGO MARVEL's Avengers seems to be on the collectibles, since there are only 15 story levels to play through. Of those 15, only 12 are dedicated to telling the stories of the movies. The other 3 are dedicated to short stories of Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor. The LEGO games usually thrive in re-telling an already told story with added humor and charm, but due to the reduced number of episodes the stories become too compact and hard to follow. Even the humor and charm seems somewhat phoned in, as most scenes simply attempt to rely on a running gag involving a milkshake. You normally play as multiple heroes throughout each level, some stages of which can take place in vastly different places from one another, so the level design feels disjointed.
Small improvements have been made to every LEGO game over the years, and LEGO MARVEL's Avengers is no different. The game will now (finally) remember which red bricks you had turned on between your gaming sessions, so you don't have to go into the options menu and turn them on every time you start up the game. Most characters now roll after landing from a jump, which helps keep their movement speed up and thus keeps the flow of the game moving at a good pace. Unfortunately there are also a few notable feature removals from this iteration. There is no small character select wheel when playing in free play, you must always choose from the giant roster of characters available which quickly becomes tedious to try and scroll through. Speaking of the giant roster, there are many characters included in LEGO MARVEL's Avengers that only the most hardcore of Marvel fans will recognize, yet inexplicably removed from the game is the feature that tells you each characters' skill on the character select screen. I ended up using only a small handful of the available characters who's skills I already knew throughout the game because of this. Of other small annoyance is the minikit detector still not being able to make up it's mind about whether it wants to show me where the minikit will appear, or what I need to do to make it appear.
The LEGO games have always thrived on charm, but LEGO MARVEL's Avengers misses the mark in that department. And when that happens the flaws that the LEGO games have appear more brightly. LEGO MARVEL's Avengers is a one step forward, two step backwards entry into the series, making small improvements to the franchise but removing features and still refusing to fix the problems that have plagued the games forever. It's still enjoyable to play, but it misses the heights that previous versions have reached.