Developer Traveller's Tales have certainly made a name for themselves in recent years, mostly by Lego-ising popular films, with everyone from Harry Potter to Batman to Star Wars being turned into plastic fantastic platformers that go down a treat with children and the young at heart alike. As was revealed a few months ago by way of a snippet of information, the next on their hit-list is the Marvel Universe, with Lego Marvel Super Heroes set to draw on over sixty years of comic book lore, with everyone from Abomination to Wolverine showing up to the party. According to the folks behind it, the game currently has over a hundred different characters, with the list still growing by the day. Currently confirmed characters include Loki, Thor, Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk (who's also the first not-so-mini-figure they've ever created), Black Widow, Spiderman and Deadpool, with plenty more to come.
Hulk SMASH!
The story centres around big bad guy Galactus and his lackey the Silver Surfer, who somehow manages to smash up his signature surfboard, scattering uber powerful Cosmic Bricks all over the world. What follows is a cutesy platforming dash around, as your team of Marvel Super Heroes try to nab all the bricks before they fall into the wrong hands, and much like Lego Batman, it's story sees you leaping between the hero and villain stories - which sounds suitably awesome. Set in a Marvel-ised version of New York City, packed full of locations that should be familiar to comic book fans (such as Iron Man's Stark Tower), you'll also find that the levels have more of an emphasis on fighting to match up with the large-scale hero brawls of the comic books, although the puzzles, collectables and (Hulk) smashing should still be intact.
In the previous LEGO games, different groups of characters have had different abilities, encouraging you to switch between them to solve puzzles, or take on a particularly nasty enemy, but LEGO Marvel Super Heroes takes that to the extreme. With so many characters on offer, Traveller's Tales have given themselves the mammoth task of making sure every single character plays differently, with their own special moves unique to each super hero. The Hulk is twice the size of every other character, and as such can pick up large objects and lob them around, smashing through anything that gets in his way - but he can also transform back into Bruce Banner, who's nerdiness means he's great with computery things. As you'd expect, Iron Man can zip round the skies firing missiles at all and sundry, whilst Spiderman's Spidey sense is all intact as he climbs up walls and zips around with his webs.
Lego Marvel Super Heroes is shaping up to be another stellar entry in the Lego series of games, and it's nice to see the team at Traveller's Tales diverging slightly from the direct film adaptations that made them popular. The game swings onto the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Wii, Wii U, DS, 3DS and PS Vita this autumn - until then, check out the Amazing, Mighty and Uncanny team in the trailer below:
