It’s another Lego game! The latest one in this style, in fact.
As usual Cathy and I played this together over a period of time. It’s one of the superhero games (the fourth one under the DC banner), so there’s a fun selection of characters with wacky powers. The premise here is that it’s a game about the villains, which informs the plot and how the story mode plays out, but the free play roster is still stuffed with heroes, and bloated with duplicates (eg. Superman, Superboy, Supergirl, Bizarro, Ultraman, etc.).
One of the key new features is the integration of the character creator. Lego games have always let you design your own in-game figure to play as from available parts, but the campaign here starts with that process, and your new OC takes centre stage in the plot (albeit voiceless). They get new powers over the levels, and end up being an extremely useful polymath, as well as increasing your attachment to them due to their prominence. I thought we’d both get equal chances to do this so I took the lead; sadly it’s just the one but Cathy made herself later with complementary powers in the usual creation suite. Our lead villain then was Flit, whose yellow-and-green colour scheme I picked randomly but it happened to line up perfectly with the parademons who showed up as part of the real antagonistic faction, giving her a built-in imagined backstory as a defector.
The plot involves villains teaming up (with lots of bickering of course), to stop the Crime Syndicate from Earth 3 who are posing as good guys. They turn out to be puppets of Darkseid, and the Justice League ends up joining forces with the villain group after being absent most of the story. They also get their own post-game mini-campaign. Joker (played this time by an audibly aging Mark Hamill reprising his role from Batman The Animated series, alongside Kevin Conroy as a Batman who does not match the tone of the game universe) is positioned by marketing as the main character but really Harley plays the protagonist role. Of course it’s all inconsequential to the real point of the game, which is flying around, smashing things, and collecting stuff, which is as good as ever.
A few nice improvements in this one: the character select screen’s ability filter, which highlights anyone with a specific skill. The minimap and hub menus are drawn on an in-game phone interface, a nice touch that ties in with the plot detail of Harley’s phone and one of the collectibles (vandalising hero portraits then taking a selfie), plus NPCs now text you after a quest with some follow-up gags. The hub subquests of finding various hidden objects, returning from Lego Marvel 2, are made much more achievable and worthwhile with the addition of written hints. As usual we had a few crashes and more minor bugs, but this was an enjoyable experience and, I think, one of the better Lego games.