Handheld Wars Week 13 - LEGO Marvel Avengers

I have the Vita version, played through it earlier this year, a fairly mediocre game overall.

It offered an open world to free-roam around in with side quests, secrets and bonus missions to play alongside the main story mode, but they were all of very basic variety like fly through the rings on a timer a-la-Superman 64, destroy enough things to earn a set amount of points to win, find and shoot a set amount of hidden targets within a time limit, defeat a set amount of enemies within a time limit etc..

The story missions were very poorly connected and it was very hard to follow what was happening, I'm assuming you have to watch some of the Disney Marvel Avenger movies to get it becuase the game did not fill you in anywhere near enough, suddenly I was in the snow fighting some dudes with Captain America and the Hulk, then I was in New York free-roaming, then there was a tunnel car chase and all of a sudden I was inside a virtual cyberspace place fighting a big head boss thing, then a giant robot worm comes out of a wormhole and attacks New York.. I tried to make sense of it by rewatching some of the cutscenes again but I still felt a lot of context was simply left out and the game was left feeling like a bunch of random stuff thrown together with a roster of Marvel characters just kinda tagging along for the ride.

Gameplay wise it was otherwise the standard LEGO game fair, you have a set of characters with different abilities, strengths and weaknesses to pick from and you go through the story levels in a linear fashion fighting regular enemies, solving puzzles, finding secrets, boss fights and vehicle sections.

As someone who isn't a Marvel fan in general and definitely not having paid much attention to the Disney movies as of recent years and even less so the Avengers series in particular there were a lot of characters I've never heard of before and also a lot of characters I was expecting that simply weren't there, like Spiderman and other characters from the Spiderman series, or X-Men for that matter, I know those are all Marvel, but there's none of that stuff here, this is exclusively limited to content directly from the Disney Marvel Avengers movie(s?) it would seem, which is a shame in my opinion as they have quite a lot more to offer than what is found in this game. They don't even have characters directly related to some of the characters that are in this game, like She-Hulk, so while The Hulk is in this, Jennifer is sadly missing, this makes me very sad.

The usual differences between the 3DS and Vita versions are accounted for with better framerate, visual quality overall, faster load times and better controls on the Vita. Content wise I don't know if there's any difference between the two.

My vote naturally goes for the Vita version.