With games like Marvel Ultimate Alliance and X-Men Legends on the market, it’s always nice to remember how comic-based games used to be: crappy. There’s been a recent trend lately with games based on Marvel’s comics, where they don’t end up terrible. DC has been simply unable to mimic this, and while the Marvel universe is credited by games like Hulk: Ultimate Destruction and Ultimate Spiderman, DC is repeatedly sullied by games like Batman Begins, Superman Returns and, most recently, Justice League Heroes.
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Justice League Heroes is the kind of comic game that everyone kind of wishes they could forget, from back when they were guaranteed to be terrible. The game is based on the Justice League cartoon, and features all the main DC heroes (Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and Flash) as well as a few second-stringers (some magician girl and some green guy). The gameplay is fairly simple: X attacks and B jumps, pressing B twice as Superman and Wonder Woman makes them fly and the touch screen is used to lock on to enemies. There are some other details like summoning other random heroes to show up and do a single hit, and some special super powers, but they’re fairly unimportant. While this setup seems foolproof, it is actually embarrassingly ineffective. The attacking is so terribly inaccurate that it’s almost impossible to consistently hit enemies. The lock-on functionality doesn’t really solve this problem, either, as it’s still overly difficult to actually hit enemies and what’s worse is how no matter how far the character is from the locked-on enemy, it remains locked-on without an easy way to toggle between units, or even revert to free-roaming controls. Not that it really matters since it’s insanely easy to die. In all seriousness, in a game with enemies swarming absolutely everywhere, it takes a remarkably low number of hits to get killed. And to top it all off, lots of the levels necessitate the destruction of enemy spawn gates, so while the Flash is whiffing punches, trying to complete the objective, enemies will endlessly pop out of the gate right next to him, resulting in death mere seconds later. Needless to say, this ends up being one of the worst games available on the DS.
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The story is the typical Justice League fodder that simply doesn’t matter since the game has probably never been beaten. There’s some kind of strange satellite flying around the planet that houses a group of super heroes (they neglect to mention the ease of travel between Earth and the base, of course) that everyone knows as the Justice League, made up entirely of the most popular and the most obscure characters in the DC universe. And using that general back-story, random villains pop up with a legion of followers that the random collage of heroes must fight. The story progresses linearly from there, pitting the Justice League against a handful of second string bad guys, and some of the more popular ones later on, but in the end, story takes a back seat to what should have been button-mashing fun.
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The graphics in Justice League Heroes aren’t half bad, to its credit. The characters and environments have a fair amount of detail, and are quite colorful. There are also little still scenes that take the place of cut scenes or FMVs that look pretty good as well. The sound is standard repetitive music found in handheld games that are mediocre at best.
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Justice League Heroes is certainly not a game that can be recommended for the DS. All in all, this is just a watered down port of an already mediocre game that is nothing short of crappy. If there’s anybody out there who MUST buy a Justice League game, just get the slightly less awful console versions.
