Well, it's after Christmas. Got some new games, so new reviews will be coming out. On that note, I know it is the day after Christmas, but I had previously rented the game for a few days prior. So I have gotten quite far into the game. I beat the main story. I have over 100+ characters right now. I think I'm in a good spot to review the game.

Plot

SHIELD and Iron Man are chasing the Silver Surfer. Dr. Doom attacks him and takes the cosmic bricks for their power. He forms an alliance with some of the villains, but it is revealed to be Loki's plot all along, as he wants revenge on Earth and Asgard, so he concocts a plan to use Galactus for vengeance. It is up to the Lego Marvel Heroes of the world to save it. It's a pretty simple and straight forward plot.

Characters

Hah! I'm not going over each character in the game. But there are plenty of characters. You can play as many of the Avengers, X-Men, Guardians of the Galaxy, to even some of the Marvel's best villains like Dr. Doom, Magneto, and so on. The roster is just huge.

Pros:

The Roster: The roster in this game is like I said, big. There are 150 characters (originally) out of 168 (?) I believe if you get the DLC packs. Most of the characters come with their own abilities and I will expand a little bit on this in another section.

The Storyline: The storyline is very simple. I basically explained the whole thing in the beginning. But why is it a pro? Because it is so simple. The game to me takes us on the good old fashioned superheroes fight bad guys days. And at the end of it, everything is good. This isn't like the host of Marvel events over the past few years where heroes are constantly fighting heroes, or they fight a common enemy but someone has to die. No, it was a happy ending for once. I think the game kind of took us to what comics originally meant. When a character was supposed to die, it was a big deal. Nowadays, someone dies and 6 issues later are back. It wasn't a compelling tale, but it was fun, light-hearted, and the game ends on a good note.

Gameplay: Gameplay was awesome. The game is set in Marvel New York, so it's big. The game is a sandbox and free roam, so I like that stuff. You get a lot of characters that do different things. Some can double jump. Others can just fall on their heads. You can glide, levitate, or do the fun thing and fly. I like the characters that do fly have their unique ways of doing it. They stay faithful to Iron Man repulsors, Human Torch is flaming, Silver Surfer...surfing, Thor needing to spin his hammer around. Now some characters will float or fly in a similar fashion, but the game at least gives them like their own unique aura and stuff to match the character.

Each character will generally also have a special ability. Certain characters can only shoot bolts of energy while others can do steady beams of different types like lightning, ice, fire, optic blasts, etc. Some characters can use telepathy, others telekinesis. Some just block stuff with a shield or force field. Or some characters just clobber or smash. These abilities will come in handy on missions and are fun when just goofing off. And some characters can't do jack but might have a gun to make up for it. Plus, there are a bunch of different vehicles to use in the game.

There are also side missions from helping get taxis to fighting hordes of frost giants or HYDRA agents. These can award you with vehicle or character tokens. There are also side story missions narrated by Deadpool. These you need a set number of bricks to enter the buildings. The cool thing is there are 250 bricks. So it takes awhile to get all of them, but it keeps you busy.

Cons:

The Roster: The roster is kind of a double edged sword for me. While it is huge and is plenty versatile, I found some characters ...unnecessary? And let me explain, I understand some characters are there just for fun, but I think game found the line and slightly crossed it when they could've put someone else in. Do you want to play as Mary Jane or Gwen Stacy in the game? I didn't. They are there. There are also about 4 web swinging characters in the game that I have so far. Spider-Man, Venom, Carnage, and Superior Spider-Man. Venom can at least Vulk out into his massive Hulk/Venom size. This also gives him a different powerset, but it was cool. I can understand having another character in there like Carnage, but he doesn't do anything different than act like Venom but he doesn't have a second stage he can enter. Then we have Superior Spider-Man. He has a different suit than Parker, but also has the Ock arms. The arms don't do anything....I think it would have been better to add him as an alternate outfit. Parker already has an alt outfi, but a 3rd wouldn't hurt when Iron Man has like 7 different outfits. Some of them useless.

The other downside is when they just kind of half-ass a character. Emma Frost can go diamond in the game, but they don't give her telepathy. Drax and Elektra have the exact same template. They do the exact same attacks and both use sais. The only difference is one is a green, bald space explorer while the other is hot Greek ninja. They could have at least given her the silent scream or telepathy or something. Or give Drax his knives instead of sais.

Glitchy: Not really a huge problem, but the game isn't without a few bugs. I just wanted to point out a few that happened to me. When I flew jets or other flying vehicles and they exploded, the character would turn kind of on an angle. I would then be stuck running around with said character on angle. I would try and correct this problem by picking another character and the character would be upright in regular standing position. The glitch is though if you pick a character with anything attached to the back like cape, you lose it. Thor, Emma Frost, etc won't have their capes. Venom or SpOck won't have their back pieces. I just exit back to the main menu and reload the game. Every thing was fixed. During some side missions, some enemies get stuck in walls. I had this happen in a Captain Britain mission where a Hydra agent was stuck in the ceiling with his legs dangling out. I killed him with Cyclops' optic blast, but it took me awhile to find the guy as all I heard were jumping noises.

Summary:

Overall, it has been an awesome game. I haven't had a good game where I could just kind of turn off my brain in awhile. With a game this big, I didn't expect it to be perfect, but clearly the positives outweighed the negatives for me.

Rating: 8.5/10