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I bought the Playstation Portable version of Justice League Heroes (JLH). I wasn’t really planning to, but I’d finished by Christmas shopping and was mulling around the shops when I spotted it on the racks. One moment of weakness and several hours of game play later and I’ve just completed the first level. I’d pretty much concur with almost every other review you’ve read of the game. It does indeed feel like a clone of X-Men Legends (XML) and if you’ve ever played the Playstation Baldur’s Gate games then you’ll recognise the same hands at work. That’s not a dig, its a nice game, but I think you’re only really going to enjoy it if you’re already a fan of the characters.
Level one sees you controlling Superman and Batman against a hoard of robots that are infesting STAR Labs. The controls take a little getting use to, particularly the superpowers, but the animation is nice. I did tend to favour Superman and his heat vision – definite flashbacks of Cyclops’ dominance of XML – but Batman is still a usable character. I’ve only just started Level 2 which features the Martian Manhunter and Zatanna. Visually Zatanna is the most inventive character so far — a female character with expansive chest area and a top down camera angle: you do the maths.
At times JLH feels more limiting than XML in that you only control two character and you can’t, at least not from the outset, change who those characters are. However, one positive side of the simplicity is that it makes the transition to the hand-held market very smoothly. With a PSP you don’t want an overly complex game – you want something that can be regularly picked up and put down and which breaks up the action into nice bite sized sequences. A maze that takes five hours to complete is fine on the XBOX360 or PS2 when you’re sat in a nice arm chair, but when you’re jumping between trains, planes, or buses you want something a little shorter.
I’ll post more thoughts as I go through the levels.
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