Justice League Heroes

I'm honestly not a Justice League fan.  I'm not a fan of comic books in general, and when I was a fan of comic books, I mostly read Marvel Universe stuff.  DC comics always felt... old to me.  So I'm hardly a fanboy for the IP in this game.  You can play through the game with the 7 mandatory characters.  Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter, Zatanna, The Flash and The Green Lantern: John Stewart.  I wasn't even familiar with John Stewart (I know the white Green Lantern and Green Arrow but not the Black guy), and I have no idea who Martian Manhunter or Zatanna are.  There are six unlockables characters aswell.  The worst for me was the bad guys.  I have no idea who any of them are.  So the story aspect of the game did nothing for me.

From a gameplay standpoint, Justice League Heroes wasn't the worst Hack and Slasher I've played (last gen).  Far from it, but it does alot of things wrong that annoy me.  For one, there wasn't any freedom, outside of your skill sets, in this game.  The combat is super simple, and otherwise boring in the long run.  The level design is linear and boring.  The quests are repetitive.  

Besides that, I dug the cutscenes.  I liked leveling up and building skills.  And.... that's it.  It's a short and simple game you can blast through in a few days.  It might offer some fun Co-Op, but it's so mindless that it could get boring quickly too.  If you can find it cheap, then go for it.  It holds up better than Marvel Ultimate Alliance, in my opinion.


----------Battle System----------
Justice League Heroes is an Action/RPG, not unlike Dark Alliance or X-Men Legends.  I'm almost positive this is made by the same people that brought you the original Dark Alliance aswell.  The weird thing is, they give you less freedom in this game than the already linear Dark Alliance.  The game is just a level to level game, there is no NPCs or shops.  Another non-freedom element is the character selection, or should I say, lack of character selection.

There are only 2 levels in the game where you can pick which characters you want to go into battle with.  I didn't even bother playing with the any of the 6 unlockables.  I limited myself with just the 7, story drive main characters.  

You can only take 2 characters with in you battle, so the only you want to play and an AI controlled or 2nd player controlled character.  A 2nd player can jump in at anytime, so that's pretty cool. I like when these mutliplayer driven hack and slashers let you take an AI controlled character with you in battle.  The only ones that I remember doing this was the X-Men Legends series and to an extent, Bard's Tale.  

The only problem with an AI Controlled Allie is the freaking retarded that AI character is.  Sometimes your AI character will hit a wall and spin in place, or they will get stuck between pillers.  Another annoying trait is they rarely fight how you want them to.  One example is a boss fight of sorts, where you have to blow up a door.  To blow up the door you must wreck crates, that hold bombs inside of them.  Once you break the crate, sometimes your AI controlled character will grab the bomb and throw it at an enemy.  Oh, there was also a time limit too.  So I had to replay this one a couple times because of the dumb AI.

Besides that, the combat is fairly mindless button mashy fun.  It's not difficult by any means.  This is actually one of the easier games I've played in my life.  You can use combos by mixing your quick attack (A button) and hard attack (B button) but it was almost pointless to bother.  You can kill just about anything in your way with a few quick attacks.

You gain experience after each kill.  One very cool thing is they give you an option on how to distribute the experience you gain.  I choose a 50/50 with my partner.  When you gain a level, you don't really gain stats (or atleast visible ones).  Rather, you gain skill points which you can distribute among your skill sets.  Each character has the same amount of skills to learn, and the same stats to boost if they choose.

One of the few loot drops in the game are tablets.  Let's say you assign 1 skill point to Health.  This means your Maximum HP will boost.  With the tablet loot drop, you can equip it to that skill point to boost your Max HP.  You can mix and match these loot drops to form different tablets.  This is actually the deepest part of the game.  

You can switch between characters the two selected characters on the fly.  There are a couple "puzzles" in the game that require certain characters, but it's nothing like a Wild Arms dungeon or even X-Men Legends.  For example, there is one level where you play as Superman and he can't pass the Kryptinite lasers, so you had to use your other character to bypass the lasers, and then turn off a console to stop the lasers so Superman can pass.  This is actually the only puzzle in the game, they just repeat it in a few variations.  


----------Characters / Story----------
It's a simple enough storyline.  There isn't a singular main character, but you do start off as Superman and Batman.  Basically, all of the Justice League is fighting in their regions until the world is slowly being attacked by robots and earthquakes.  So the Justice League separates and fights the bad guys.  That's it really.  

While I enjoyed the actual cutscenes, I thought they're paced horribly.  You would get a cutscene after every other level, and there wasn't any story within the levels, and the cutscenes were edited really quick.  So there was alot said in a short time, so the storyline felt rushed and not well paced at all.


----------Graphics----------
The graphics are.. ok at best during gameplay.  The level designs are really lacking, you can pick up alot of things, but there isn't much to do within the levels.  I'm impressed with the short load times and large levels though.  The cutscenes look really freaking good though.  I was seriously impressed with them.  It looked like they coded them with a game engine, and then put a little polish over it.  Similar to Resident Evil 4 on the PS2.  You can see that little blur that it isn't a full blown CGI cutscene, but it still looks awesome.  I'm not a fan of the quick edits during the cutscenes, but they still look better than Marvel Ultimate Alliance on the 360.  I'm not kidding.

----------Sound----------
The music is what you would expect from an action game / super hero game.  Just low level, ambient music.  The voice acting is pretty good though, especially during the cutscenes (which there was alot of).  The characters do chat while in battle, but it was hard hearing them between the music and the sounds of robots exploding.  So I never understood any of that in-battle dialog.


----------World Map----------
There isn't one.  The game flows like a standard arcade beat'em.  There is no choice in which direction you lead, and you can't backtrack.  The levels are straight linear lines too.


----------Time to Complete Game----------
8 Hours?

I'm not sure how long Justice League Heroes was, but I beat in a weekend in 2 sittings.  After you beat the game you can "Continue Play", which restarts game but with all the experience and items you gained during your first playthrough.  You can't unlock all the unlockables on your first playthrough, which is kinda lame.