3/5 ★ – Endless_backlog's review of Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2.

Lego Marvel Superheroes 2 follows directly from its predecessor and offers a new story with a wider but varied roster of characters. Due to ownership issues between Disney and Fox, the X-Men and Fantastic Four were omitted but yet the roster increased in size from 155 to 271. The biggest inclusion is the Gaurdians of the Galaxy and they are given the main focus, although The Defenders (Daredevil, Jessica Jones etc), Ms Marvel and even other universes characters like Green Goblin 99 and gun wielding Spider-Man Noir are available. Defending earth once again, the avengers face their latest threat in Khang, conquerer of planets, who has transported cities from various timelines to build his own nation of Chronopolis. Due to this, there are lots of fun locations, from Wakanda, Ancient Egypt, Asgard and of course New York. In order to challenge Khan, the heroes will need to acquire pieces of the Nexus (what’s that). Each level in the campaign will assign you a different team of characters, and you can complete them at your own preference, with a selection of 3 or 4 levels available at a time. Each level begins with a news segment from J.Jonah Jameson summarising the previous events, which was funny and at times kept me on track with what was happening when some of the levels blurred into one. My only gripe with the team choice was with The Inhumans (Black Bolt, Medusa etc) as I didn’t know a single one of their characters, so I didn’t have the refreshment of switching to one of my favourites when I didn’t engage with a character. It also meant I didn’t know any of their powers so the puzzles became less intuitive and slowed the pace of my play to a holt. As for the puzzles, there’s actually a lot of new additions. Dr Strange can rewind time to manipulate the environment around him like repairing broken walls. Ms Marvel can enter a cube that you rotate to move her towards a switch. You’ll sometimes need to rearrange a jigsaw/mosaic or complete a circuit to progress. My biggest gripe with LMS2 is that I suffered some bugs that forced me to restart. Whether it was not progressing due to other characters AI getting stuck running into a wall and being unable to select them to help them out, or some ridiculous platforming execution that was almost guaranteed to fail. Some of the buttons serve multiple purposes too so I found myself hitting an enemy as Spider-Man only to start swinging away. The environments weren’t that eye catching despite its best efforts in variety, and the roster just wasn’t as exciting for me as before. LGMS2 is still a fun game but would benefit from some patching, and it has a huge roster that is good fan service for more hardcore marvel fans than me, but I just wasn’t hooked like the first game.