The Justice League is just about done Justice
Written: Feb 22 '07
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Pretty Fun
Cons: Could be better
The Bottom Line: A fun, if unspectacular game. The best depiction of the Justice League in videogame format to date.
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| flash-hammer's Full Review: Justice League for Xbox |
Despite sporting some of the most recognisable pop-culture characters in their roster of superheroes, for some reason DC Comics never seem to know what to do with them when it comes to videogames. While Batman has ruled the toy shop for years, Superman and Wonder Woman are almost everyday phrases, DC’s rarely seem to be able to pick developers to make good games out them. Batman has probably fared best, although that’s due to his exposure in cartoons and movies lending him more opportunities, but contemptible software like the infamous Superman 64 or Aquaman, which never even saw release outwith the USA for the Xbox have done their best to drag the good name of the company, and it’s characters down.
What makes this so puzzling is that DC always seemed so good at having their characters adapted to cinema. It took until the late 1990s and Wesley Snipes Blade before Marvel Comics had a successful movie under their belt (although 1989’s The Punisher was good, it hardly set cinema alight), now compare that to DC, who had Superman, Superman 2, Batman, Batman Returns and successful successful TV shows Wonder Woman and Lois & Clark/New Adventures of Superman, not to mention the excellent but underrated Flash TV show, and let’s not get into their animated success stories. Yet while Marvel managed to excel when it comes to licensing their characters for games, DC seemed stuck in a rut, fairly generic, if not totally un-enjoyable cartoon and movie tie-ins for Batman being their only highlights. Justice League Heroes was meant to change that, an ‘Action RPG’ in the vein of X-Men: Legends and it’s sequel, the game got somewhat overshadowed by the bigger budgeted Marvel Ultimate Alliance, released around the same time, yet, with fandom in heart and boredom in mind, I plumped for it, hoping to finally find a DC game worthy of adoration.
The plot revolves around the Justice League, the collective force of Earth’s greatest superheroes, who operate out of ‘The Watchtower’, a high-tech installation on the surface of the moon. While many heroes have featured in the Justice League over the years, the core of it is built around Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash and Green Lantern. Joining them as main characters in the game are The Martian Manhunter and Zatanna, although Green Arrow, Huntress, Hawkgirl, Aquaman and 2 further Green Lantern’s are waiting to be unlocked and lend a hand. When waves of robots attack Superman’s home city Metropolis, the League investigate, to discover the robotic genius Brainiac is behind it, however this is part of a larger scheme he is implementing, involving various other nefarious villains like Killer Frost, Queen Bee, Gorilla Grodd and The Key, but is Brainiac really pulling the strings? It’s up to the League to find out.
Before I get to the actual game, I think I’ll offer my thoughts on the plot and characters we have on offer. Now the core plot, while hardly anything overly imaginative, serves it’s purpose fairly well. I’m sure anyone with remote experience with the Justice League or DC Comics in any incarnation, even be it the recent cartoon series, will know Brainiac isn’t behind it, and will be able to make a pretty safe guess who is. While I don’t have a problem with this, after all he is DC’s biggest villain, it’s his underlings I find somewhat questionable. Brainiac is solid enough, and good to have as the decoy main villain, and the clone of Doomsday is nice, but the rest of the villains just plain suck. Gorilla Grodd is worth a bit of a laugh, but the talking, mind-controlling ape isn’t anywhere close to the best DC has on offer. Not that he is the worst enemy chosen for the game, not by a long shot. Now I’ll admit I haven’t read a comic in a good few years, but I’ve never even heard of The Key or Killer Frost (although the fact she seems to be a Batman villain and her icy powers lead me to believe she is perhaps something to do with Mr. Freeze) I think I’ve heard of Queen Bee, she was just so lame I kinda forgot about her. How on Earth did they come up with such a lame rogues gallery? The GBA game, which had Zoom the Reverse-Flash and Circe had a better villain line-up! You could have stocked it with Bat-foes alone and it would have been better. I would rather they had given the player an all-star villain line up to square off against.
Then there is the JL line-up. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash and Martian Manhunter I’ve no complaints about. The questionable ones for me are Green Lantern and Zatanna. Yes, I just said Green Lantern. It’s not the hero I’m against, it’s the version. The game’s main GL is John Stewart, the GL from the Justice League Unlimited cartoon. Now, Hal Jordan and Kyle Rayner are unlockable (more on those later) it just seems a bit odd, given that the game doesn’t appear to be based on the cartoon, and aimed more at fans of the comics, where Hal is the most popular and Kyle one of the more recent. The game does seem to be at odds with itself as to whom it wants to appeal to, kids who like the cartoon or comic fans, seeing as The Flash is portrayed in his lippy, comic-relief incarnation as seen in the cartoon, and Hawkgirl is included as an unlockable… but then why have Zatanna, a relatively obscure character, in ahead of her?
As I mentioned, there are a number of characters, as well as alternate outfits for the starting characters, to unlock. The sad thing is that you won’t get to use them all that much. You see, while the characters become playable, they aren’t part of the story, which means the only time you’ll get to play as them is when the game gives you the option to pick your characters…which doesn’t happen all that often. So in effect they are just alternate skins with different moves (apart from the 3 GL’s, who all have identical moves) which is a bit disappointing when you realise you actually only have 7 heroes for most of the game.
So onto the actual game, while labelled as an ‘Action RPG’, that’s basically the game’s way of pretending it isn’t what it is, a tarted up Beat ‘em Up. While some missions do indeed have objectives, we aren’t delving any deeper than ‘Destroy the Door/Machine/etc’ or ‘Activate 4 consoles’, the gist of things is beating up minor foes until you square off against a boss character. At your disposal are 2 attacks, quick and strong, a jump and 5 Special Attacks, activated by holding down the L trigger and pressing one of the face buttons, or the R trigger. Each character has their own selection that fits their superpowers, Superman’s heat-vision, Wonder Woman’s magic lasso etc and each of these attacks is powered by a small blue meter below the health bar to make sure you don’t spam them. Where the RPG elements come in is the now standard practice of having your characters gain ‘experience’ points in the form of glowing green orbs which emerge from defeated foes. Collect enough and that character goes ‘Up a level’ allowing you to upgrade their moves and abilities. Sadly all the characters are not equal when it comes to special attacks, as anyone who tries to play as The Flash, whose special moves are infuriatingly similar to one another and only one, the meter-eater Hurricane is actually hugely useful, will discover.
However, the game is always played with 2 heroes on the screen at any given time, meaning unless you have a friend ready for some co-op action, you are looking at an AI teammate. While initially this is enough to make any gamer tremble, the AI for your partner is actually very workable. You can switch between the 2 characters at any time by pressing up on the D-Pad, or if there are 2 human players, both press up at the same time. While this may garner complaints for some gamers, I mean X-Men: Legends let you have 4 on-screen heroes! Yet personally I think I actually prefer this system, it means more enemies onscreen, and slightly bigger characters to look at.
Now, as we all know, the most important part of any game is it’s gameplay, and despite it’s shortcomings, I actually really enjoyed Justice League Heroes. You see, I think many of it’s faults actually come from the fact the license isn’t done, if you’ll pardon the pun, justice. However this doesn’t mean it’s a bad game by any means, it just means it could have, and probably should have, been better. It’s very possible to get addicted to destroying hordes of Brainiac’s robot drones or monsters from another dimension, and on one occasion I even found myself up until 3am plugging away at the game! It’s very simple, and can be picked up in minutes, but then holds the same appeal as the games it’s closest to, brawlers like Final Fight or Double Dragon, it’s quite addictive, and it is pretty cool wasting hordes of enemies with your favourite hero, strangely it works better than Marvel’s games in this aspect, your characters just seem that bit more powerful and true to their source material.
Sadly, we aren’t looking at a title with a whole lot of replay value. While I have played it through more than once, it was mainly to use the hidden characters and costumes you can unlock by collecting Justice League shields that are scattered throughout the stages. Sadly, it isn’t exactly clear where you do the buying (in the upgrades menu, it’s 4th option to the right) so I missed this and could actually have unlocked most of them during my first play-through. As I mentioned the story doesn’t differ, so there really is no real draw to playing again unless you have a particular affinity for one of the characters and want to take what could be a rare opportunity to play as them.
Controlling the game isn’t too challenging, with the 4 face buttons controlling your 2 attacks, jump (double tap to fly for the applicable characters) and action button/pick up/throw. R blocks and as I mentioned L is your special move modifier. You play with the Left Thumbstick, with the D-Pad being used to switch character or assign your AI buddy simple instructions, and in general it’s a simple and workable control system. There’s no major flaws in layout or response, and I plain didn’t have any control problems.
Graphically, the game is a bit mixed. The stages all look very nice and well detailed, and range from the streets of Metropolis to an alien dimension, in fact the character models look and move decent as well, even with the many alternate costumes. The problem with the costumes is that the camera is really too far back for you to tell the difference between some of the outfits. There is a way to zoom the camera in to behind the character you control, making it look more like the straight-up action game it is, although the camera movement when in this view was a bit dodgy, and to be honest I’ve no idea how I ended up in the view in the first place. Nothing is spectacular visually, but it does a job. The really offensive graphical flub comes in the cut-scenes actually, I mean why is Wonder Woman so damn ugly? She’s an Amazon for Christ’s sake! Otherwise the cut-scenes are decent enough, though make it patently clear the game is multiplatform.
The sound is once again nothing brilliant, but it’s capable. The music tries it’s best to be dramatic, but just falls a bit short, perhaps it comes once again from expectations raised be the license, it’s hard to picture Batman or The Flash without the superb themes Danny Elfman penned for them or Superman’s John Williams number, come to think of it even the League’s cartoon theme is epic and heroic sounding, the music here, while not bad, just seems a bit hollow in comparison.
While it isn’t really all that much better technically, personally I preferred Justice League Heroes to X-Men: Legends for some reason. Like I said, it just seems to get the ‘feel’ of the characters more. I mean it could still do with a lot of work, something hopefully a sequel could address, and considering it launched at a budget price, as probably one of the final games for the original Xbox, I’d say it’s a fun purchase for the DC Comics fan out there, or even for the folks who enjoyed the Marvel games and want a fix of a similar game.
Recommended:
Yes
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flash-hammer
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