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Lego Marvel Superheroes 2

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    Lego Marvel Superheroes 2

    I got this for the Switch a little while ago so I could have something just fun to play while on a Skyrim break. There are a LOT of Lego games at this point and they all feel kind of familiar. This one is no exception but, in spite of some real frustrations, this one is great and very easy to recommend.

    The game begins with the Guardians of the Galaxy and then branches out to a whole load of other Marvel heroes including the Avengers, Spider-Man, the Inhumans and some really obscure historical ones too. It’s an original story so not bound to the movies but has a kind of Secret Wars feel, with Kang being the bad guy who brings together a whole bunch of locations from history for some reason. This is actually really excellent because what it leads to is a huge open world with each area feeling really different - New York beside some future New York and a Noir part next to ancient Egypt and so on. And each area has its own characters like Spider-Man 2099 for example. So it’s a huge fun mix of areas and eras all merged into one. The main open world feels like a Marvel version of Lego City Undercover where there is loads to find, you can drive vehicles or fight bad guys and find a whole lot of side missions.

    The story doesn’t just take place in the open world - it takes you through missions and different places as the story progresses. As usual, they can be played through in free play mode once completed. While the game has its own story, it has lots of nods to recent Marvel movies such Thor and Guardians. And the time hopping story can even reconcile these quite nicely even if we shouldn’t really care about that because they are Lego. For example, we have Ragnarok Thor who meets the comics female Thor who is from a different time.

    All of this is excellent but it’s not all good news. The game has frustrations. One is that it feels like, for a Lego game, it has become over complicated and unclear. The game is terrible at signposting what you’re supposed to do at any given moment and some levels feel packed full of stuff that are mostly distractions. It requires trial and error and even when you find the solution it doesn’t always give you a sense of why that thing was important. While the game has a load of characters and that’s great, the unique abilities mean that often just one character can activate a certain thing - the abilities used to progress are too narrow at times. This is unfortunately taken into the combat too. Many enemies can’t be damaged and have a lock symbol showing but it is rarely clear why. Sometimes it’s a time thing - something else needs to happen before they can be hit. Sometimes it requires a characters with an ability to break their armour. Sometimes I simply have no idea. That makes the really basic combat annoying at times. There is no danger because it’s Lego and you respawn instantly so it doesn’t add a sense of peril, just a sense of combat taking far longer than it should sometimes.

    In both of these areas, the simpler form early Lego games took seemed much better.

    In spite of those, the overall form of this Lego game is superb. There is a massive amount of characters and a load of them have unique abilities which are fun to play with. I find it quite cool that the open world parts seem set up for most of them. You can fly anywhere but in many places there are handholds so you could climb to the same places, for example. The glaring omission is the X-Men. They are very noticeably absent and it would have been cool to have them too. Someone somewhere probably cares about the absense of the Fantastic Four too. Or possibly not. But the available characters give plenty of choice.

    So some frustrations and I would actually prefer the game to go simpler but the open world is great, the characters are a huge amount of fun and this game has LOADS of stuff in it. It’s a full game. Recommended.

    #2
    What are the loading times like and crucially, to keep in with the NTSC-UK raison d'etre: what's the frame-rate like?

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      #3
      Loading times on the Switch version are pretty great once you’re in - a fairly hefty load on startup. But then all good. Nothing like Lego City Undercover at all. No idea about the frame rate. Looks fine to me but I haven’t looked for it.

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        #4
        [MENTION=3144]Dogg Thang[/MENTION]: was it the physical version and if so, was there download when you first started up? I've decided to not buy any games that require a download to be functional.

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          #5
          I got the physical deluxe version but I honestly can’t remember about the downloads because I had DLC downloads due to it coming with the season pass code. So there were downloads but what I’m not sure is if one of those was essential to the main game.

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            #6
            Started this on the Xbox One, but only a couple of levels in so far, need to find more time, or not play Gears 4 as much
            Lie with passion and be forever damned...

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