There's a real art to crafting a good superhero story. Ideally, you want the stakes to be sky-high, building to a shattering climax that screams Nothing! Will! Ever! Be! The! Same! Again! And yet, the most popular comics characters have been around for decades, which makes it tricky to mess with them. Whatever you try and do to Steve Rogers - and in the past decade alone, Captain America has been assassinated, resurrected, de-super-soldiered and even replaced by his best friend - eventually it will all be undone. When you're dealing with iconic IP, and your business model is predicated on another issue coming out next month, things can never really change.
Does that sound familiar? Traveller's Tales' Lego series is the most storied franchise of them all, rummaging around and playing dress-up in loads of different toyboxes. But whatever the cosmetic livery, be it Horcrux or Jurassic-related, the gameplay remains distinctive, that signature mix of unhurried exploration and light puzzle-solving, interspersed by knockabout combat and endless stud hoovering. Even 2015's Lego Dimensions, the most ambitious Lego game for a decade, merely added some toys-to-life functionality to the core experience rather than risking rebuilding it from the ground up.
Stasis isn't necessarily a bad thing, and it's cemented the Lego marque as one of the most reliable in gaming, for both the target audience and their harried parents. And in all honesty, there's already so much going on in Lego Marvel's Avengers, a game that attempts to roll up six different blockbuster movies into one semi-coherent package, that it probably wouldn't have been the ideal time to try and implement radical changes to the formula. Instead, it's another incremental improvement, bursting with confidence and adding some impressive cinematic polish while never quite eliminating the franchise's occasional moments of wonkiness.
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