Every Lego Superhero Game RANKED

“Lego The Incredibles” is…man, it’s a rough one. To its credit, the open world is just fine. The side missions are fun, the Pixar builds are exciting to find and piece together, and the collectibles aren’t too harrowing. However, the main campaign is what really falls apart. Not only does it rewrite key emotional moments in the first “Incredibles” movie in a way that feels forced and lazy, but the structure of making your players go through the sequel before the 2004 original comes off like it was cobbled together and structured just for the sake of promoting “The Incredibles 2” first and foremost. To borrow a phrase from the first movie, this game made us wish the Supers’ secret identities were their only identities.

Of the few Lego Marvel games, there is no question - “Avengers” is the weakest of the stack. You can love it for being a more lighthearted rendition of the first two “Avengers” movies. That’s fine. But when it comes to some of the design choices, “Lego Marvel’s Avengers” seems scatterbrained at times. Much of the open world feels bloated for the sake of bloating game time with Gold Bricks scattered about with comically basic puzzles. The sound design is messy and unbalanced as characters will mutter dialogue as all other sound gets muffled. And then the reuse of New York City as a main open world setting was utterly uninspiring. And this all goes without getting into the technical problems that really hamper this game.

“Lego Batman 3” is an interesting case. As a game, it has its own problems, some of which are shared with other Lego games, such as crashing, mission objectives bugging out, the whole shebang. When looked at through the lens of a superhero game, it succeeds and falters in two different ways. On one hand, you have an excellent roster of characters that brings together almost every corner of DC Comics fandom from movies and television to obscure and forgotten characters. On the other, it falls by the wayside because of how mundane the open world is, primarily because of how copy-paste the different Lantern Corps planets feel. It isn’t a Lego game we’d tell you to steer clear of, yet it isn’t one we would highly recommend.

Now, “Lego Marvel 2” can be criticized for a similar reason as we criticized “Lego Avengers”. The open world is massive to a point where some players might feel overwhelmed by its sheer size. However, it does feel a lot more cohesive than a mere scrambling of set pieces inspired by the MCU. The game’s theme of time and dimensional travel makes sense here, and it allows for one of the biggest rosters of characters in Lego games that pull heroes and villains from across Marvel history. The big and the small, the popular and the obscure, the old and the new, it all meshes into a meaty package that makes sense and feels more fresh and imaginative than what we got in “Avengers”. As we said, it can feel overwhelming at first, but find your pace, stick with it, and “Lego Marvel 2” can be a satisfying jog.

Considering how formulaic Lego games were prior to 2012 and how stale they were becoming, “Lego Batman 2” felt like a real step in the right direction. Rather than rehash another hub world with linear level design, “Lego Batman 2” gave us the chance to run around Gotham City in an open world, setting the blueprint for Lego games moving forward. On top of that, it expanded the boundaries of the Batman world by including, as the name implies, other DC Comics characters. The only reason it doesn’t rank any higher on this list is that the story is somewhat forgettable. It isn’t awful, but it isn’t memorable either.

The first “Lego Marvel” game was so unbelievable due to how frequently TT Games worked on Warner Brothers properties, most notably Marvel’s main competitor, DC. Regardless of which comic book brand you love more, “Lego Marvel Super Heroes” was top notch in every way. In addition to offering a fun campaign with excellent comedy, dialogue, voice acting, and level design, the game created one of the most fun renditions of New York City we had ever seen in gaming, meshing real world landmarks with Marvel’s own locations. This made room to include entertaining side missions, clever puzzles, fun races, and so much more. Every corner had something unique about it, making it the best of the Lego Marvel games.

It is a little bit funny that the first “Lego Batman” somehow still tops its sequels, and we swear we aren’t saying this because of rose-tinted glasses or anything. There truly was something special about “Lego Batman 1”, and it mostly stems from the main campaign. At first, it seems like a game that lasts about as long as “Lego Indiana Jones” - fifteen levels that can be finished in a few hours. But then you discover the switch to Arkham Asylum in the Batcave and suddenly, a second game unlocks, one where you can experience fifteen other levels focusing on the villains’ side of the story. It becomes a meaty two-game bundle with creative puzzles, great humor, and an excellent feeling of adventure.

Odd that a game where you play as the villains tops a game about superheroes. We gotta be honest, though, it's sometimes good to be bad. “Lego DC Super Villains” is unique not just in its mesh of Gotham, Metropolis, and various other DC landmarks, but in how it blends other ideas into one coherent package. Take the custom character, for example. Custom characters used to be a background feature, a reward for unlocking character types and allowing players to create a Swiss army knife, a minifig of all trades. Here, your custom character becomes a part of the story, but it doesn’t steal the spotlight from DC’s gallery of criminals. Everyone gets their time to shine here, celebrating DC Comics’s most notorious in the best of ways.