"So, we're putting a team of super bad guys together to take down another team of super bad guys. Interested?"
--Joker, Lego DC Super-Villains
In the spirit of Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2, Lego DC Super-Villains merges an enormous cast of characters from its respective comic universe with a host of side quests, a grand but fairly lighthearted story featuring a major DC villain (and plenty of other villains who try to stop them), and references to entertainment outside of DC. It stars a player-designed and player-named character who acquires more powers throughout the main story until he or she becomes one of the more versatile and powerful characters in the game. However, a core part of the game is unlocking the 100+ other characters by completing story levels, finding character icons when replaying levels, or finishing side missions. This is a game that completionists will have to spend many hours playing to unlock them all.
Production Values
The general graphics are not necessarily better or worse than those of other Lego games I have played on the Switch, meaning they are not terrible by any means but do little to showcase what the system can accomplish visually the way that first party games tend to. It does also mean that there tends to not be any consistently jagged pixelation, blurry objects in the foreground, or major slowdown, just the occasional freeze that requires a system restart. The audio even kept running the only times I experienced this screen freeze. Thankfully, the sound effects and dialogue elevate the newer Lego games such as Lego DC Super-Villains far above what it would otherwise be (not that the basic Lego game formula is bad without the dialogue).
Voice acting for practically the whole cast is a very strong and large component of the game. Indeed, every character one can play, perhaps besides the custom characters, can talk out loud, and so can many NPCs that wander around the locations of Lego DC Super-Villains--which are very diverse locations that draw from. The swampy area around Belle Reve where the Legion of Doom has its hideout, the agricultural setting of Smallville, the city of Metropolis, the city of Gotham, and other environments are all available for exploration. Each broad site has its own side quests that sometimes relate to the comic and cinematic lore of the location.
Gameplay
Collecting Lego studs and minikits (but now there are five minikits per level instead of the 10 the original Lego games had), building and destroying environmental objects, and switching between characters to pass through areas is still the majority of the story mission gameplay. Anyone who has played other recent Lego games, especially Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2, will be very familiar with the mechanics. The enormous list of playable characters and the alternate modes some of them can switch between will probably be one of the biggest draws for casual and veteran players alike. There are even details that make doing otherwise normal things with the characters more unique than in past games, like how switching a character for a new one who is not currently in the world actually shows the old character leave and the new one appear using a boom tube, the Apokalips teleportation technology Steppenwolf uses in Zack Snyder's Justice League.
Simply progressing through the story levels will not unlock all characters, though. Optional missions scattered across the world, like one where you help Condiment King attack people who gave his restaurant a bad reputation with poor reviews, unlock the character who gave you the mission for purchase. The vast majority of the playable character roster is filled by completing such missions and spending the Lego stud currency afterward. Similarly, completing timed races that might require flying vehicles or characters (like Donna Troy or Sinestro) or a certain type of car unlocks a new vehicle that can be summoned in open spaces. The only other kind of optional mission is a long series of small to extensive puzzles that lead to golden bricks, which can be used to manipulate statues, one being at each of the major locations of the open world.
Story
Some spoilers are below.
Commissioner Gordon turns to an inmate of Stryker's Island for help, but the character (customized by the player) helps Lex Luther escape and encounters an alternate version of the Justice League characters that call themselves the Justice Syndicate and claim to come from Earth-3, their ranks including Ultraman, Superwoman, and Owlman in an inversion of DC's "trinity." This world's Justice League vanishes, and it becomes clear that the Justice Syndicate is hardly heroic and trying to find artifacts with seemingly sinister intentions. The Legion of Doom gathers villains like Poison Ivy, Gorilla Grodd, Sinestro, and Black Adam in an effort to stop a group more threatening than the Legion of Doom itself is. In the shorter DLC missions included with the deluxe edition, four levels are derived from more recent DCEU movies (Aquaman and Shazam!) and thus those levels have the same general story as the scenes they borrow from the films. One other DLC level shows something that happened in the background of the main story and the final one draws from Batman: The Animated Series.
Intellectual Content
Collectibles and puzzles are large parts of most Lego games, whether simple or more complex and prolonged. Most of the puzzles involve using the powers of a specific class of character (electricity manipulation, using hyper speed to break certain barriers, cloaking to get past security cameras, and so on). Some puzzles and missions are only available upon the completion of others in the case of optional hunts for golden bricks, and some of them can require more elaborate planning or thought than others. The most difficult part actually tends to be how certain character abilities are not specified at all or specified to be needed for specific situations until you use them in the situation at hand. The sheer number of golden brick puzzles will still give completionists hours beyond the story levels, which of course have their own mandatory puzzles or ways of finding minikits.
Conclusion
Anyone who appreciated the lore references and structure of Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2 will find that Lego DC Super-Villains offers the best mechanics and strengths of that game, just using characters and locations of DC. The extensive character roster, side missions, and DC and popular culture references make this an ideal game for DC fans already familiar with the Lego style of gameplay. The deluxe edition even has six additional levels that in some cases are derived from DCEU films like Aquaman and Shazam!, which bring DCEU versions of the characters with them. In its deluxe or standard editions, this is a game that offers an abundance of content and makes use of the most deserving ideas from a previous Lego game about comic characters.
Content:
1. Violence: The extremely minimal, non-graphic violence of Lego games is basically exactly as it was before.
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