Lego Marvel Super Heroes isn’t very good. The last lego game I’ve played was the first Star Wars one and that was a while ago. While I think this game has some charm with its characters and references and while I think somee of the core gameplay is quite solid, there was too much of a confusing mess when I tried playing this one and I stopped pretty quickly to go spend my time somewhere else.
This game could use a ton of context clues for what you can do / what you have to do to proceed.Even a simple QTE felt confusing at the very beginning of the game where all it said was X, did I have to mash X? Did I have to hold X? No matter what I did, the game gave me no feedback for it. There are a bunch of places where a little gauge fills up when you’re in the process of doing something correctly, why not show that in all situations where it would apply? It’s not consistent. I’ve found multiple places where you got a prompt to press a button to do something - go through a grate, pull a lever, etc. But sometimes, there was none, and in these situations, I’ve wandered alone aimlessly looking at what I had to do to proceed because there wasn’t any prompt telling me I could push a thing by just walking into it at a certain angle.
Sometimes, the game is a bit misleading too. There are secrets in most levels where you can come back in free play mode with another hero to discover hidden things. These things can be hidden behind objects that require magnetism to move, or fire powers, or flight, or what have you, and I think it’s a nice idea and it adds replayability when there’s a component of exploration to your otherwise linear simple brawler, but the fun ends when the game tells you what you need a web-slinging character to open a door, so you go and search the rest of the area for the place where you have to go, only to discover that Mister Fantastic’s stretchy arms can open that door. Are his arms webs? Why not just tell me that Mr Fantastic can open the door? He’s one of the two characters I have to use right now
Besides that, the controls are a bit weird, you can try to go places that you won’t be able to, you can jump pretty close to spots with interesting things, only to be stopped by shady boundaries. You can almost skip some puzzles and it won’t be obvious if that’s the right thing to do and you’re just executing on your idea wrong or if you have to do something else beforehand. Sometimes you’ll try to do exactly as the game says and even with precise controls and the best focus you can give, you’ll fall, lose some of your lego currency and get to try again. Gliding over chasms as Mr Fantastic should be a triviality, you use that character, you jump and glide to the other side, it shouldn’t be a 50/50 chance that you missed the frame perfect trick for getting to your destination. That’s what it felt like, anyways, not great platforming.
The heroes are funny, the powers they all have are somewhat interesting, they feel different from each other and the fighting is okay-ish (altough most boss fights are more puzzles than actual fights), but I really didn’t enjoy Lego Marvel Super Heroes, even the basic controls felt clunky to me, the number of times I have switched my hero by mistake shouldn’t be that high and I wish that you only controlled one guy at a time so the puzzles could be simpler to figure out and you wouldn’t have that other guy to switch to by mistake, only to watch your previous hero run all the way back from where he was for no reason. Maybe you control one guy and the Y button would’ve been used to ask the AI controlled partner to use his ability to solve puzzles? That would’ve fixed one thing out of many, maybe.
