This review contains spoilers, click expand to view.
It seems like there are 2 teams building LEGO games. The first team is using an enhanced engine that fixes a lot of the flaws of the original, has a tighter story and is generally more enjoyable. This team created LEGO Incredibles and LEGO Force Awakens. The other team is using the same buggy engine that LEGO games have been using for years. Given the limits of the engine bugs are all over the place and the controls are bad. LEGO Marvel, LEGO Harry Potter and LEGO DC Super Villains fit into this category. After playing a couple of the recent LEGO games that are solid this seems like a massive step back.
Let's start with the bugs that plague this game that we thought had finally been solved. Characters get stuck on scenery and cannot get out except dying. I had to restart entire levels because of this. Characters falling through scenery is also common. The horrific vehicle controls also return along with the races that make you want to throw a controller. Barely touching the stick and your vehicle is most likely going to do a 90 degree turn into something. Didn't this get fixed a couple of games ago?
Like a few of the earlier LEGO games, this game does not support resuming play after the Xbox goes to sleep. I cannot think of a single other series that has this problem. It should be a requirement for certification that your game can resume after going to sleep. Instead you have to sit through the, unskippable, intro every single time you wake up your Xbox. Why does this game require that I stare at trademark logos for several minutes just to play your game. Hint: I'm not watching your logos. I start the game and go get something to drink or whatever. When I get back it will finally be at the loading screen I care about.
The story is OK but there was so much potential here that I'm just shocked that this is the best they could come up with. I cannot understand the rationale for making the bad guys behave like good guys for story sake. In all the other games you play good guys and eventually unlock the bad guys. This should have been inverse. Let me play as the bad guy and do bad guy stuff. Then have me fight the good guys and eventually unlock them. But no, the story takes the bad guys and makes them act good and then team up with the good guys for more good. So much potential lost here. You could have replaced all the villian names and you would have had a generic comic hero story. Just so, so disappointing. It also seems to have way more levels than needed. Each level is longer than normal and so they just drag on and on. Almost every level has a boss fight where the boss instant-kills most characters which makes most levels just dull. It could have been several levels shorter and conveyed the same story.
Fortunately the world isn't as congested with stuff as in previous games. I'm really tired of playing through a LEGO game in a couple of hours and then spending dozens of more hours doing the "non-story" stuff that every game seems to think is necessary now. There is some of that here but just not as much.
The character selection is really a letdown. Beyond a couple of the bigger characters all the main ones are characters only a DC fan would recognize. Clearly they are trying to reuse characters that had similar powers to the Marvel games as you see the same abilities with minor changes. Overall unlocking a new character was uninspiring. One of the big "changes" to this game is the ability to create your own character but it is mostly a useless point. Other than being a plot point throughout the story and eventually giving your character almost all the super powers you need there is no reason to choose this character over any of the existing. Having a single character with multiple powers also makes it less necessary to switch characters which solves the problem of having to find the correct character to use for a certain interaction but mostly makes using multiple characters (and hence the # available), pointless. I do like how they add filtering so you can more easily find characters with the ability you need (fire, demo, etc) but I think the previous game where it would simply auto-select the character you need when you stand in front of the selection was easier to work with. Also the sheer # of ability filters shows there is probably too many abilities to care about anyway.
Overall an OK LEGO game that completely messed up the potential it had. If you like the older LEGO games and can live with the same bugs then this is going to be more of the same. But for anyone who has gotten spoiled by the newer LEGO games with the better engine then this is going to be a slog.… Expand
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