by Stephen DeckAlso available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Mac OS, and Windows
Review written by Stephen Deck; originally published 03/20/2020 on Teacher by Day, Gamer by Night
If you’ve played one Lego game, you’ve pretty much played them all. Likewise, if you’ve played one Lego game, you probably want to play them all because they’re freaking awesome. Lego DC Super Villains is no exception; it has the same lovable Lego aesthetic and feel with the familiar gameplay but in a game where you play as some of the best villains from the DC comic universe.
The premise of DC Super Villains is that you’re a super villain (obviously) working with Lex Luthor and Joker to cause chaos and take over the world or whatever cliche super villain scheme they have. That changes, however, when the Crime Syndicate from Earth-3 shows up and zaps the Justice League into purgatory or something. Suddenly being the lesser of the two evils, the Legion of Doom begins to recruit other super villains to oppose the Crime Syndicate and whatever it is they’re planning besides the standard world domination trope. That was actually the source of my main disappointment with the game – I wanted to be a VILLAIN, not a normally-bad-guy-but-forced-to-be-good-ish-due-to-circumstances-guy. Don’t get me wrong, the game is still super fun, but it wasn’t quite what I’d been expecting.
Being a slut for customization options, my favorite aspect of the game was the character creator. You get to create a Lego supervillain as wacky or terrifying as your heart pleases. Naturally, being one who takes as little in life seriously as possible, I went for as wacky as possible. Behold…the universally feared and reviled Buhtseks Bandit! They thought their silly language filter would keep me from being pointlessly vulgar, but once again, my mental depravity proved superior. Your custom character’s gimmick is that they can absorb and gain new superpowers, so your character starts off kinda meh but becomes more and more useful as the game progresses.
Visually and audibly, the game is fantastic. It looks great although the smooth plastic Lego aesthetic isn’t exactly super intensive on system resources. Still, though, the game’s colors really pop, and the Lego brick models do a great job of blending the unique Lego look while staying distinctly DC. The characters are all fully voiced with some serious industry heavy hitters reprising their usual characters. Mark Hamill, Michael Dorn, and Tara Strong all lend their voices to their usual characters just to name a few. The quality of the voice acting can really make or break a game especially when it uses characters that have a well-known voice in other media. Keeping those voices for this work was a big part of my personal enjoyment here as I’m just a huge fan of Hamill, Dorn, and Strong in general.
While I wasn’t able to test this myself because I have no friends to hang out with (cue sadness), there is two-player local cooperative gameplay in Lego DC Super Villains. Since I wasn’t able to test it personally, I can’t speak to how well it works, but if it’s like other Lego games, I imagine it’s a great way to share the experience. In this increasingly online-obsessed age for gaming, the inclusion of local multiplayer of any kind in a game just tickles me pink.
I may have had my personal disappointment with not ACTUALLY being an evil supervillain in the context of the game’s story, but Lego DC Super Villains was still a hella fun experience that definitely fits in with the other licensed Lego video game experiences. If you’re a fan of Lego games, especially the other licensed comic book Lego games, then you definitely need to check this one out. There are over 150 playable characters in the game plus over half a dozen custom character slots plus all of the collectibles hidden throughout the world that Lego games usually offer, so you can definitely play around with it for a long time to experience everything the game has to offer.
