Lego Marvel Avengers is another Marvel Superhero themed Lego game. This time the story is set to the movies from the early sections of the MCU series.

The game does a fairly good job of presenting some key moments of the films and there are some bonus DLC levels. They spent a lot of effort making the game seem dynamic and stylish like the movies and they did that by using movie audio and recreating many moments as cutscenes.

The story levels are reasonable but the free play is the real draw of a Lego game. The free play in this game is frustrating and that lowers the overall quality of the game. During free play you explore hub worlds, relay levels and have the ability to switch characters at will.

The user interface isn’t fun or easy to use. To select your level you have to sit through a loading screen, then listen to a level intro every time a level was played. It just felt unnecessarily slow compared to the older Lego Marvel game or even Lego Indiana Jones. This was made worse by the game having multiple hub areas which you have to travel between with more stupid, unnecessary load screens disguised as a jet. The attempts at making it look better really made it look worse.

Replaying the levels was frustrating as the dynamic cutscenes just became intrusive in the middle of trying to solve a puzzle in this puzzle adventure game. The character switching seemed to take too long, worsened by the fact that some characters had to go through a menu to reach the character selection menu. Add these things together with the slowness to do anything and the fun was really sucked out of this one.

As for collectibles it has True Avenger on each level as well as gold bricks, minikits, characters and vehicles plus the traditional red bricks.

The vehicles in this game were made pointless by the addition of speedy characters that could do land races and the flying characters could do flying races. It became a needless feature.

The character roster was focused on the Avengers which makes sense. However the spare slots that filled out the full roster had a lot of mostly vague, unknown characters rather than the big names that the Lego Marvel Superheroes had, no X-Men, no Fantastic Four and no more of my favourite Ghost Rider.

The addition of DLC levels damaged this game too. Instead of the collection of Deadpool bonus levels that we got in Lego Marvel Superheroes we got the extra levels without Deadpool’s wit and without the need to collect gold bricks first, making them just for completionists.

They did make one move which improved the free play experience. They split the levels up, showing which bits had however many collectibles and allowed you to choose which section you start on, this was a merciful move for those like me that we’re getting frustrated with how slow it all felt, it made it easier to chip away bit by bit until I hit that hundred percent.

Overall, this game threw disappointment after disappointment at me. All Lego games are built well so it’s not a bad game. It just wasn’t fun for the most part. I wouldn’t recommend getting it unless you get the Marvel multipack. Diehard Avengers fans may like it more though.