Another day, another Lego game played to completion with my spouse.
As always, we played this in co-op. She says the superhero games are her least favourite because the stories are so stupid, and I can’t disagree with that. This time around is a bit better than poorly abbreviating a bunch of movies we haven’t seen; the idea of this one is a big dumb crossover between different time periods and parallel universes in the Marvel thingyverse. This lets them cram in… 18 different settings into one hub, which makes for decent variety.
The levels are your standard Lego fare. Punch the things, get the studs. A rotating cast of Marvel busybodies bashing up anonymous goons and the occasional villainous face, while big baddy Kang—suffering a severe personality deficiency—occasionally taunts them. I do always appreciate the bombastic designs and powers of the playable characters, especially diving deep into the expansive roster to find a new favourite or two.
There’s a lot of movie influence of course, with all the big names I don’t care about turning out with their endlessly tedious quips: Corporal Yank-o, Metal Dude, Professor Weirdo, Cat Guy, Space Bro. They do expand the roster pretty well, elevating the likes of Ms. Marvel to prominence (while giving her many tedious quips), as well as heavily featuring the Spider-verse while again studiously ignoring the existence of mutants or the Fantastic 4.
After playing some earlier games, I appreciated the quality of life tweaks added here: summoning vehicles anywhere, auto-highlighting a contextually useful character in the picker, character bios, things like that. The hub has lots more to do as well, with scavenger hunt-type “challenges” along with the usual quests, races, and puzzles. The random NPC dialogue is among the most annoying I can remember though, and for some reason complete split-screen is now forced at all times; it never shifts or joins up even when in the same place during a level.
Still, the game runs pretty well and is reasonably bug-free. And it’s a Lego game! I like those! I like big hubs with lots to do as super-doofuses! And I like playing with my chosen life-mate, she’s cool.
