Recent reviews by Pudd

this made me cry on a bus once

Pound for pound, this is the most interesting, engrossing, and funny game I've played in the past few years. Just 15 hours took me on an incredible Western-genre-bending journey that I'm still incredibly hooked on. I want to 100% this game and, easy collectathon games I can play while listening to podcasts nonwithstanding, that never happens. Please play this game. It's only $10.99. It's worth it.

There's absolutely way too much gristle here before you get to the real meat, and the only palatable portions of this game. Everything about the story campaign is poorly planned, poorly audio mixed, poorly executioned and purely a grind. Constantly stealing your camera to show interminable 'Here's Where You Should Go' cutscenes, dialogue that is brought into extreme relief by the goofy animations (it's UNREAL how bad Loki and Ultron's dialogue is, I'd forgotten that about the movies), AWFUL unskippable battleship-like decoding puzzles among literal dozens of other things make it impossible for me to recommend this game to anyone. You'd be much, much, much better off getting the previous LEGO Marvel game or literally any other LEGO game on the Steam store page.

The saving grace to this tarnish on Traveller's Tales' record is the open world, unlocked after the story is over. With its original writing and voice acting, which was sorely missed in the story mode, along with the actual pure joy that is super jumping all over town as dozens and dozens of characters that would otherwise not get any representation in a video game, it's almost enough to get you to ignore the overall abysmal faults.

Bullet List Time:
-I loved having all the women characters in the open world, it was great getting to use Sif and Jessica Jones and Hellcat and America Chavez
-I loved not being hamstrung to using the main Avengers team for the puzzles and challenges, with each having a female counterpart.
-I loved super-speed. This is a great game to just run around in and stop and do whatever mission or quest is nearby. Having all three speedster characters be able to run up buildings was an obvious, yet genius, move and it always brings a smile to my face.
-THANOSCOPTER
-I have a really hard time deciding on the worst chapter in story mode but I gotta tell you, I had zero fun throughout the entirety of the Avengers 2 campaign. All the missions were tedious, the presentation confusing at best, and the way the final level could end without your say-so REALLY made it tough to replay it to 100%.

In short, don't buy this game. At least not until its $5 on sale like the rest of the catalogue.

I felt that Lantern worlds are a poor replacement for the open world cities of the previous post-Lego Batman 2 efforts and the second half of the game definitely suffers for it. However, the quests are much easier to do as a result and so is 100%ing the game which I honestly just gave up on in Lego Marvel. It's kind of a Catch-22 in that way.

While I often felt Wonder Woman specifically was written strangely before the emotions plot and I still think Lego Batman 2 is kind of the pinnacle of their type of storytelling and cahracter voice, this game was much more enjoyable than Lego Marvel's writing wise. It's easy to tell the Lego team at Traveller's Tales finds it more natural to tell stories and jokes about the DC characters than the Marvel cast and that's great.

Honestly, my biggest complaint is that the Flash Family are so slow in the open world sections, every single one of them is outclassed and outsped by literally every villain or hero who can fly. But that is just me. I like the Flash a lot and I'm in love with the idea of a super-speed open world game that I've only been able to glimpse in Lego Batman 2 so far.

This game's great, it has whole swaths of sections that are incredible and I'd love to play through again with a friend. It's just that, as a result, the few faults it possesses are extremely glaring.

Ah well, at least they managed to finangle Orion in there somewhere.

THE ONE TIME THEY INCLUDE MOOKS AND DONT MAKE THEM PLAYABLE IS THE ONE TIME I WANT THEM OH MY GOD JUST GIVE ME A PARADEMON

nah

ONE TIME I WAS FIGHTING A MEGASCORPION AND THEN I RODE ON THE SCORPION ON THE WAY TO FIGHT ANOTHER MEGASCORPION. THEN ANOTHER TIME I WAS FIGHTING TWO SCORPIONS AND A HELICOPTER AND THEN A THIRD SCORPION JUMPED ONTO THE HELICOPTER AND CRASHED IT INTO THE SCORPIONS.

The jokes that Marlow Briggs trades with his mayan aku-aku death mask that brought him back from the dead are great too. It's just really enjoyable.

Except when it wants you to platform which is a significant portion of the back half of the game. That part sucks.