Marvel is a hot commodity these days when it comes to gaming. The latest Xbox 360 Holiday bundles include Marvel: Ultimate Alliance as a great multiplayer option for new gamers. But what if you want to play a game with the whole family and your wife simply hates “gaming controllers with all those buttons and different things to remember?” Sound familiar?
Think back to a day when families gathered around the kitchen table to play games together. Nowadays the TV is often the center of family attention. Are we too focused on the TV to focus on our families? Perhaps, but that’s not what I’m here to talk to you about today. I’m here to talk to you about the Marvel Heroes DVD Game by Brighter Minds. The Marvel Heroes DVD game is literally fun for the entire family. It allows you to use your television to bring your family together for gaming time.
I know the cynic in you is screaming “oh no, not another DVD game, those are lame!” Having forced Big Brad to review a DVD based pirate/space/zombie game a couple of years back, I can totally understand your hesitation. I too was a bit hesitant when PreGameLobby was offered the opportunity to review Marvel Heroes DVD Game. But then I thought that it might be a good way to have a nice friendly game for the entire family and decided to give it a shot.
The Marvel Heroes game comes with a board, 4 gameplay pieces, a deck of villain cards and the DVD game.
If you play at home you can use the gameplay board along with the playing pieces and all of the villain cards. With all of the in-car entertainment systems these days, however, the beauty of a DVD based game is the fact that you can take it with you and play it in the car. Simply leave the playing board and pieces at home and you are ready to go!
When you start up the game you are treated to the background story for the game. Twenty-five super villains have escaped from jail and are attempting to take over the city. Each of the 25 villain cars provided with the game contain facts about the villains. These alone are really cool to have.
You then choose up to 4 players or teams and gameplay length (capture 5 villains or 7 villains).
What makes the Marvel Heroes DVD game great to play with your entire family is the fact that you can set the difficulty level for each player.
This to me is an awesome feature. I set my difficulty to hard and my 4 year old daughter’s and 6 year old son’s difficulty to easy. It was a great way to even the playing field and make it challenging for all of us. From this point you reach the main screen of the game where you are treated to the 7 different challenge modes available in the game.
If you are playing with the game board you roll the dice and move your character the rolled number of places. Each space has one of the 7 different gameplay modes. These are (in no particular order):
1. Downtown Maze: A maze-based game where you choose the proper way for your superhero to travel in an attempt to stop impending doom. The maze is in two parts and you have to choose properly in each part to stop the impending calamity.
2. The Villain Locator: Use Xaviar’s locator to determine the name of a villain. The villain will slowly come into view and you must shout out their name. You capture a villain by guessing correctly. The game provides you with a set amount of time for you only to guess and then another set amount of time where other players can shout out the name and steal your points.
3. What Did You See: You are shown a short game clip and are asked a question about some portion of the video clip. Guess correctly and you capture a villain.
4. Marvel Team-Up: A tough memory game where you must match up the appropriate superhero team members and avoid matching up the villains.
5. Rooftop Jump: Time your button press to jump your superhero across a rooftop towards the villain on the other side. Press the button in time and you will capture a hero.
6. Superhero Scramble: You must move three separate segments of a rolling wheel to match up the head, torso and legs of a superhero.
7. Marvel Quiz: Answer Marvel-related questions to capture a superhero.
All of the gameplay modes were a blast to play. My son loved just about every single one except for the rooftop jump. I thought this one was a bit odd as well, but it did break up the question and answer type portions of the game.
We played the game on my PS3 and started up a short game. Strangely enough there was some sort of error with the Marvel Quiz mode that dropped us out of the game. I could never figure out why it was giving me errors, but it worked fine on every other DVD player I tried it on so figured it was just something funky with the PS3.
Overall we had a blast. Notwithstanding the easy of controlling the game with a remote, my wife had other things to do. My 4 year old daughter lost interest after a handful of the gameplay modes, but my son and I played for a couple of hours. The Marvel Heroes DVD Game was easy enough for either of us to control with only the DVD remote and we had fun playing the game together and competing (at different levels for both of us) for the win.
It was a good time together and both of us enjoyed ourselves. The most telling comment made by my son after we had finished playing pretty much sums up the entire game. “That was fun dad!” I don’t think I can sum it up any better than that.
Marvel Heroes DVD
Linear Mode
