Review | Marvel Super Hero Squad: The Infinity Gauntlet

Marvel Super Hero Squad: The Infinity Gauntlet is based on a television show which in turn is based on a line of toys with the emphasis on your favourite Marvel super heroes and villains, pumped up and primed for the younger audience. The story follows on from Season 2 of the animated show where our squad must retrieve the Infinity stones, Gauntlet and Sword lest the universe be destroyed by the many dastardly villains desperate to get their hands on them.

Being a Marvel fan I was looking forward to having a crack at this one. Sure I know that these are the baby versions of the heroes but what the heck, there are plenty of my favourites on offer from the usual suspects of Wolverine, Spidey, Ironman, Hulk through to the lesser known ones like Magneto’s children, Scarlet Witch and Nova. Having seen the series on TV, I was expecting the game to easily match the visuals and more, especially given the fantastic cast of voice actors including Mark Hamill, Steve Blum, Jim Parsons and George Takei, however the graphics were less than inspirational and certainly did not make use of the power of HD consoles at hand.

In story-mode, the game is broken down into short chapters where you’ll play as two heroes as they slug it out against the hordes of evil minions. The controls are simple enough, you can jump, do a close range attack, long range and also block. However you will quickly discover that the game gets by with a massive amount of button mashing and little more.

Each hero has their own unique abilitiy, which allows them to access areas of the level that the others can’t. You control one, whilst the computer controls the other, and you can switch between the two at a press of a button. Unfortunately the AI is too stupid to offer any meaningful assistance. They will generally either do nothing or charge in and be pummeled leaving you to clean up the mess. In fact more often than not they get in the way of objects that you are trying to interact with. The Heroes are also broken down into various classes such as strength, speed etc, this means that heroes of the same class are basically the same which really doesn’t offer the variety you would expect, i.e. a character that relies on speed will be almost identical in style to any other character in the same class with the only differences being cosmetic (outfit and execution).

There are some interesting environments, such as Mount Olympus and a TV gameshow, each of which contains certain puzzle elements to the levels, such as switches that only trigger with teamwork. There are also different mini-games at various points including shooting insects (first person style), and flying through asteroid fields or throwing rocks. The variety, however, doesn’t add enough to make the levels feel any less than the mindless button masher it is.

As you would expect the game improves when played with a friend, in fact it becomes almost enjoyable. When it comes down to it though, MSHS is a game that just isn’t worth your time or money; it may offer a couple hours of fun for the younger audience and hardcore fans of the TV series but that’s about it. I couldn’t even recommend it as a rental.