I wanted to write a balanced review of this (admittedly 3 year old) game, drawing comparison with past versions and trying to convey how much I both enjoy and am disappointed by these games.
But then I played it again and decided to just write down everything that's wrong with it instead. Traveller's Tales, take note.
Broken copy protection
Lego Avengers is an offline game. There's multiplayer, but it's local only. Despite this, in order to start the game it must connect to a server on the internet, presumably to combat piracy.
That would be fine except that not long after I bought the game it stopped connecting. At which point it wouldn't work. At all. Fortunately, there is a way around it, but I never would have figured it out by myself.
A game that I had paid money for was almost rendered useless by an expired copy protection mechanism system. That's some terrible after sales service right there.
Starting the game is slow
Loading is an inevitable part of any gaming experience. There are various ways of dealing with it, such as loading in the background while the player is doing things, covering it with imagery or animations, or just having a generic 'loading' screen.
Lego Avengers uses all of these techniques and the combination is frustrating and unhelpful. Just getting to the main menu involves three static images and a semi-skippable animation, which appears to take a variable amount of time before it can be skipped - sometimes seconds, sometimes most of the animation length. This happens again before every level, presumably because loading times vary.
The problem isn't that there's something wrong with these distractions, it's that after you've seen them once they come to represent a barrier to actually playing. We don't need all this fluff - just show a progress bar and stop trying to pretend loading is fun.
No autosave
Lego Avengers autosaves at the end of every level. But there are also checkpoints in each level, where you can choose to save part way through. But why make the player do that? Why not just autosave at every checkpoint, then give the user the choice of where to load from next time?
Worse, the checkpoints are often partially hidden, or off screen, so it's easy to miss them. Saving the game shouldn't a challenge or part of the game - it should be a seamless function.
Clumsy menu navigation
Here's how I expect loading a game to go.
- Launch the game
- Some kind of intro/loading screen
- A menu where I can choose to load my last save
- aaaaand... play.
I'm not going to explain how Lego Avengers does this but just try to picture the above but if someone had designed it specifically to waste time and annoy the user, and you'll probably get close.
Fixed perspective
Most of the time in Lego Avengers you get almost complete freedom of movement. This is good, because exploring and experimenting is part of the appeal of these games.
On some levels, this is different. Your movement is limited in some way to a specific set of directions, or your character is slowed, or you can't move your view around. These levels aren't fun. They're the antithesis of the brick smashing delight that the Lego games can give. I don't know why they exist.
Quicktime events
I imagine some parts of Lego Avengers look amazing if watched on Youtube. Unfortunately playing those parts is far less fun, because having control of your character is replaced by random button mashing.
Just to clarify - playing a game where I get to choose how to do things and feel like I'm in control is fun. Pressing a series of buttons in response to onscreen prompts isn't.
Scenery blocking the view
Often you can lose sight of your character because a bit of the foreground will block your view. It's amazing that this happens, because the game has a mechanism to get around it, by highlighting your position with a marker. Still, this isn't as helpful as it sounds.
So why stop there? Why not show the outline of your character, rather than an icon somewhere over their head? Or why not make the object that's blocking the view transparent? After so many Lego games this seems like a problem that could be solved, if only through more intelligent scenery positioning.
Too helpful
The game is littered with floating help icons that provide often entirely obvious information about how to do something, even though that information has been provided before. You can't turn them off but you can activate them accidentally, which is annoying.
Okay, maybe not everything
I could go on, but I sense I've started to rant. I've been so disappointed by this game that I've given up playing it. I barely had the motivation to load it up to take screenshots. It's a real shame, because behind all these quite-solvable problems there's still a good game in there.
I used to love these Lego games. They were smart, and funny, and interesting. It's impressive that they've lasted this long, but I've had enough. I'm done.
The future
The latest incarnation of this series is reportedly in the works - something to do with the newest Star Wars film, Rise of Skywalker. I saw a video about it where someone from TT breathlessly announced that this was an all-new game, because it had new maps and some of the characters would have different abilities.
I've no doubt that it'll have new maps and new abilities, but I'm certain that some if not all of the issues I've outlined above will still be present. These games make money. As long as we keep buying them, the developers have no incentive to fix the fundamental problems. Let's stop.