Let me get one thing clear from the beginning. The review's title is not the good connotation usually implied with that specific euphemism. I'm the type of gamer that has enjoyed nearly every LEGO game that I've played. Potentially I might have only played the really good ones up until now but regardless, I do not consider this game to be of the same quality as the previous LEGO games that I've played; especially nowhere nearly as good as the previous LEGO Marvel game.
As the second LEGO Marvel game, I had high hopes for Marvel's Avengers after Marvel Superheroes resonated with me in every way. That might have set this game up to fail, but there are a lot of things that Avengers does worse than Superheroes did so this game feels like a step in the wrong direction.
First off, Avengers is based on the Marvel Cinematic Universe and not the comic books. The majority of the missions focus specifically on the two Avengers films: Marvel's Avengers and Marvel's Avengers: Age of Ultron with the remaining few missions having you play through moments from more recent movies such as Iron Man 3, Thor: Dark World, and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Originally, this sounded cool in concept until I played it to find that these missions last roughly around twenty minutes each and skip large and important aspects of the scenes that they comprise.
The missions, while short, are novel in a certain way that does make them endearing to a degree. They eschew the emotions of a particularly moody and important scene with jokes about milkshakes and chickens which is hilarious at times. Another thing these levels do is take lines of dialogue spoken in the movies and supplant them into the game. Most of the time it's in the same scene that they were originally spoken but sometimes it isn't which is usually done to comedic effect. At first this bugged me because the actors were delivering the lines a certain way and having them taken out of context sounds odd. After a short time I was able to get used to this though and it and I enjoyed it for the most part. These levels also use cinematic camera angles reminiscent of big budget action movies which makes some of the fights a spectacle. This helps sell the action from the movies that the game is clearly aiming for.
Main story missions aside, the game includes multiple mini hub areas unlike the large singular Manhattan hub from the last game. Manhattan is still in this game as a hub area but it's largely scaled back as much of the content has been removed from it (I'll explain that in a bit). The hubs areas contain a smattering of side quests, characters, and gold bricks as is the norm. Manhattan contains the most while the others contain only a very small fraction compared to the larger one. I found this slightly disappointing because Manhattan is no longer as interesting as it once was with everything interesting having been removed. There is no map for any of these areas either so trying to convey to someone else where something is located is next to impossible; especially since major landmarks are few and far between. The side-missions are very short, only lasting a couple minutes at max. The content of them isn't impressive or varied at all. Expect to be doing lots of fetching and fighting as that's all they have you do.
All of those activities wouldn't be worth doing if there wasn't something you were receiving in return. Marvel's Avengers touts the largest collection of characters that any of the LEGO games offer which is an impressive feat considering how many the last LEGO Marvel game had. I was excited about this all the way up until I began playing the game and realized what characters were available. I'll tell you right now that unless you are a devout Marvel comic book fan and have followed the series since its inception, you won't know who half of these characters are. I was only able to identify maybe about a third of the roster upon unlocking all of the characters. The ones that are recognizable are the staples that everyone knows and loves thanks to the movies; they're the Avengers. However that's where the familiar faces stop. You won't find the Guardians of The Galaxy, Ant-Man, or anyone else from the MCU which is very disappointing but from playing the game it's obvious that TT Games were focusing solely on the Avengers.
Continuing on from that, the game lacks any other Marvel characters that were in the previous game. There's no one from the X-Men, Spiderman, or Fantastic Four movies/comics. Without those characters and villains, the game seems much smaller in comparison to the previous. As I mentioned before, Manhattan is scaled back and that's because of the lack of any of the buildings that were from the part of the Marvel Universe that housed those characters. All of this could have been permissible if the characters that replaced those iconic ones were worth anything. The roster is filled with D-List playable characters that no one has heard of and they play like no one has heard of them. They aren't fleshed out in any meaningful way and most of them have the exact same move sets as each other. It's a disappointing roster to say the least and I found it harder to collect everything when I was only getting things I would never want to use.
The game also struggles with conveying information to the player. Many times I found myself in a situation in which I had no idea where I was supposed to be going or what I was supposed to do. There's a marker that appears sometimes to show you where to go but that only happens in the hub areas. During missions, you won't find this marker. Instead the game just throws wave after wave of too-difficult-for-this-type-of-game enemies at you and never relents until you solve some random puzzle that is in no way made apparent that that's what you had to do. It was highly frustrating and at times made me want to walk away from the game.
Despite all of those criticisms, the game does several things right. It improves the flying mechanics to make flying easy and fun (although that comes at the price of making driving vehicles nearly impossible). The graphics are smooth and crisp with no drop in frames regardless of how much is on screen. Voice over from the movies as well as entirely new dialogue from Clark Gregg and Cobie Smulders is great especially when pairing it with TT Games' signature LEGO humor. Collecting the studs is still as addictive as it always has been and finding every last collectible doesn't lose its appeal despite the boring characters.
All-in-all I enjoyed my entire experience with LEGO Marvel's Avengers despite the many missteps and problems it does have. I've played nearly every LEGO game and while I rank this particular game near the bottom of the list, it's still fun to play.
Score: 6.5/10
Trophy Difficulty - Very Easy. You'll find yourself with a healthy amount of trophies after completing the main story missions. The remaining trophies all deal with collecting everything and them playing as certain characters in a single session making for another easy Platinum.
Recommendations - If you like TT Games' LEGO games, you'll enjoy this game. If you enjoy the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, you'll like this game. If you like mindless humor and/or collecting things, you'll enjoy this game. If you're looking for a large cast of interesting and fun to play characters, I do not recommend this game. If you liked Marvel Superheroes and want more of that I cannot recommend this game.
*This game was reviewed on the Playstation 4. It is also available on the Playstation 3, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Nintendo 3DS, Wii U, Playstation Vita, and Microsoft Windows.
This review was originally written for Real Dream Productions. You can read more HERE.