Justice League Heroes

Justice League Heroes (JLH) as a 1-2 player action/role-playing game where you or you-and-a-friend control the heroes of the Justice League, co-op style as the battle to stop Brainiac. The main version of the game was produced by Snowblind Studios and is out for the Xbox and Playstation 2 as well as the Nintendo DS and the Playstation Portable (PSP). Having read one or two other reviews it seems that the PSP version, the one I’ve played, is actually a little longer than the other versions. There will be a spin-off Gameboy Advance title out at some point, but that only features the Flash.

The game play itself is classic baddie bashing with sets of winding levels that end with a big name bad guy fight. There aren’t a lot of puzzles and hardcore gamers may find it a bit easy, but the fun here is romping around the DC Universe controlling your favourite characters and not necessarily pure gaming for gaming sake. The linearity of the game play is broken by a series of fantastic fully-animated cut scenes that move the story along. The game is set sometime prior to pre-Infinite Crisis, but it skilfully uses a background that will be familiar to comics and cartoon fans. The setting and quality of the writing shouldn’t be a surprise as the plot was written by long time Justice League Unlimited writer/editor Dwayne McDuffie.

The plot features a core group of seven Leaguers — Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern John Stewart, the Martian Manhunter, the Flash (Wally) and Zatanna — with the plot orientated levels restricting you to predetermined pairs of characters from that roster. You can unlock additional characters for use in other levels by collecting JLH tokens scattered throughout the game. The unlockable characters are Huntress, Aquaman, Hawkgirl, Green Arrow, and Green Lanterns Hal Jordan and Kyle Rayner. The PSP version also includes Black Canary and Supergirl as two exclusive characters.

The same tokens can also be used to buy alternative costumes that grant small increases in specific abilities. The costumes are great Easter eggs for the comic book fans as you can mod Superman into Earth-Two Superman or turn Batman into pseudo Batman Beyond. The additional characters are fun, but most of them are just permutations of the main seven characters (e.g. more Green Lanterns or another Kryptonian). However, it is nice that they’ve included custom animation and voice dialogue for the unlockables.

PopCultureShock’s Justice League Heroes preview with producer Jason Ades video goes a pretty good job at introducing the game:

This game is full of nice touches and attention to detail — when Batman throws a flash grenade he covers his face, etc. The characters have the standard “block” that we’re use to in arcade games, but I’ve only just realised how specialised and tailored to each character they were. Wonder Woman’s block is her bullets-and-bracers routine — she can deflect bullets back at the enemy whilst protecting herself. Similarly the Martian Manhunter’s block is his intangibility – enemy attacks just passes through him – and Superman’s block is his invulnerability — he puts his hands on his hips, puffs his chest out and just allows the bullets to bounce off him.

Each of the characters has a range of iconic superpowers that broadly break down into a ranged attack, an area attack, a snare/stun attack, a defensive power, and a powerful close attack. The powers can be upgraded by levelling up your characters and by spending “boosts” that you collected from fallen enemies. There is a definite advantage to keeping you enemies at arms length and I personally gravitated towards those heroes with good ranged attacks (Green Lantern and Superman). One of the hardest heroes to play, for me, was Hawkgirl. Most of her attacks are up-and-close which makes her pretty vulnerable to being overwhelmed by shear force of numbers.

My favourite character right out of the box is Superman. He’s strong enough to throw around the scenery and comes with a pretty descent ranged attack (his heat-vision), however he is otherwise fairly vanilla and similar to characters from a lot of other games. Where the game gets really enjoyable is when you get to play the more obscure characters with the more unusual powers. The best of these has to be Zatanna as she has the single best superpower with the ability to turn her opponents into bunny rabbits. It may sound silly, but it can be a real relief to disperse an overbearing throng of opponents by turning them into feeble scampering rabbits. Other than that she’s pretty D&D with a healing and fireball spells.

Justice League Heroes strength as a game really rests on the great cast of characters. It just wouldn’t be anywhere near as much fun if you didn’t already have some investment in the characters. That’s not to say it’s a perfect game – the game play can be repetitive at times and I’d have preferred more combos – but the difficultly level is well judged and I’d be surprised if we didn’t see a sequel.