I’ve been needing a new bathroom game on the PSP for some time now, so I decided to give Marvel Super Hero Squad a try.
Marvel Super Hero Squad is a cartoony styled third person beat-em-up game where you help various Marvel superheroes find fractals of an infinity sword that Doctor Doom wishes to possess. As you help each hero face his own personal demons, you help save the world from the residents of (I kid you not) Villainville.
Super Hero Squad is an oversimplified comic story that caters to, if not condescends, small children. There’s no real depth to the story other than “the bad guys are trying to take something, so we have to beat them up to stop it from happening. Each of the characters is a caricature of a caricature; the most ridiculous of these is probably the Silver Surfer, who sounds like Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. “Hahaa! He said ‘gnarly, dude.’ It’s funny because he’s a surfer. Get it?” Ugh.
That said, i can forgive the patronizing nature of the story if the game is fun. Unfortunately, this is where Super Hero Squad really fails. The beat-em-up nature of the game gets old and repetitive after the first few missions, and the controls are simply awful.
This is the first game I can remember playing on the PSP that actually gave me motion sickness. The automatic camera was terrible at shifting directions during combat, and it made it really difficult to keep my movements straight. I quite literally thought I was going to vomit, and I had to frequently take breaks to keep my food down. Given the lack of shoulder button use in this game, I can’t see why they didn’t provide manual camera control.
I may give Dungeons and Dragons Tactics a try in a few weeks, but I’ve decided to take a break from the faster paced adventure games on my mobile device for now. I’ll just go back to playing chess on the smart phone. Anything to get away from Super Hero Squad.