Lego Marvel Super Heroes
Mar. 28th, 2015 01:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroEvery character who shows up in a Marvel movie and a hundred comics-only ones come together to stop Loki, Magneto and Dr. Doom from doing something evil with some Cosmic Lego Bricks.
For Christmas in 2013, Jethrien got me this for us to play together during our Staycation when ARR was with his grandparents. For her birthday (which I did my shopping for before Christmas), I had gotten her Warriors Orochi 3 for us to play together during our Staycation when ARR was with his grandparents. Apparently we think along the same lines. We ended up focusing on Warriors Orochi for all of last year (which was further delayed by buying a house), and only got back to this in February of 2015.
I’m kind of underwhelmed—the gameplay is worse and feels more “phoned in” than Lego Pirates. The writing is terrible and the voice acting (why did there need to be voice acting?) is middling at best, despite having many of the “big names” in American voice acting involved. Characters are often harder to control than in previous games, and the dynamic splitscreen can make aiming special abilities difficult or even impossible. The levels are really long (often with three or four checkpoints), which makes me much less interested in going back to replay them to hunt up the secrets. The wide open sandbox that is the Manhattan map feels like filler instead of a hub level; if it weren’t for the small mercy of the phantom coins to follow to the next destination, I don’t think we’d have even gotten to the second stage.
As noted, there are checkpoints / save points mid-stage, which Pirates didn’t have. When the game froze on the boss battle in stage 8, the checkpoint right before there was very welcome. It froze at least one other time, and we had a few instances of getting stuck in clipping errors. (Visual clipping errors, which are just an annoyance, even happen during cutscenes.) Large characters are sometimes unable to change characters in the Manhattan screen. The bad edge gravity that is often a hallmark of this series is complicated by the fact that half the characters can fly. There were completely obtuse puzzles that should be simple, but also the clear need to replay everything in Free Play to unlock fairly obvious secrets.
It feels like they loaded the game down with so much stuff, but never went back to double-check that it was a fun and coherent whole. Which is a shame: There are 15 story stages and half a dozen bonus ones, an absurd number of characters with a decent collection of special abilities, and a gadzillion things to find (gold bricks, minikits, red bricks, and Stan Lee). We only had something like 20% completion after doing the whole story and two dozen Manhattan side quests. But where other games keep me excited to go back and gather more stuff, this drowned me in little annoyances that should have been fixed in playtesting.
Overall: Lego Pirates of the Caribbean is a fundamentally better game, I’m sorry to say. This isn’t bad, but it feels like it was rushed out the door without the necessary care to make it a good game. It’s much more media-tie-in quality than I would have expected.
For Christmas in 2013, Jethrien got me this for us to play together during our Staycation when ARR was with his grandparents. For her birthday (which I did my shopping for before Christmas), I had gotten her Warriors Orochi 3 for us to play together during our Staycation when ARR was with his grandparents. Apparently we think along the same lines. We ended up focusing on Warriors Orochi for all of last year (which was further delayed by buying a house), and only got back to this in February of 2015.
I’m kind of underwhelmed—the gameplay is worse and feels more “phoned in” than Lego Pirates. The writing is terrible and the voice acting (why did there need to be voice acting?) is middling at best, despite having many of the “big names” in American voice acting involved. Characters are often harder to control than in previous games, and the dynamic splitscreen can make aiming special abilities difficult or even impossible. The levels are really long (often with three or four checkpoints), which makes me much less interested in going back to replay them to hunt up the secrets. The wide open sandbox that is the Manhattan map feels like filler instead of a hub level; if it weren’t for the small mercy of the phantom coins to follow to the next destination, I don’t think we’d have even gotten to the second stage.
As noted, there are checkpoints / save points mid-stage, which Pirates didn’t have. When the game froze on the boss battle in stage 8, the checkpoint right before there was very welcome. It froze at least one other time, and we had a few instances of getting stuck in clipping errors. (Visual clipping errors, which are just an annoyance, even happen during cutscenes.) Large characters are sometimes unable to change characters in the Manhattan screen. The bad edge gravity that is often a hallmark of this series is complicated by the fact that half the characters can fly. There were completely obtuse puzzles that should be simple, but also the clear need to replay everything in Free Play to unlock fairly obvious secrets.
It feels like they loaded the game down with so much stuff, but never went back to double-check that it was a fun and coherent whole. Which is a shame: There are 15 story stages and half a dozen bonus ones, an absurd number of characters with a decent collection of special abilities, and a gadzillion things to find (gold bricks, minikits, red bricks, and Stan Lee). We only had something like 20% completion after doing the whole story and two dozen Manhattan side quests. But where other games keep me excited to go back and gather more stuff, this drowned me in little annoyances that should have been fixed in playtesting.
Overall: Lego Pirates of the Caribbean is a fundamentally better game, I’m sorry to say. This isn’t bad, but it feels like it was rushed out the door without the necessary care to make it a good game. It’s much more media-tie-in quality than I would have expected.
