I’ve played a few of Snowblind Studios’ RPGs for the PlayStation 2; each of them has been a really great RPG. Each time the engine improved, the number of things you could do improved, different story paths… Some of the best action RPGs for the system came out of the studio.
So, I went to the wiki, found out their very next game was Justice League Heroes and hey, I like the idea of Superman beating the stuffing out of crooks. If only there was, like, a machine that could just feed crooks off a conveyer belt. Superman at the end of it, just going BOP BOP BOP.
The local retro store had the game — but it was a loose disk. NO. NO LOOSE DISKS. At this stage in my retro console collector journey, I want boxes. I want manuals. I want resale value. (These things largely don’t have resale value btw).
Punching stuff that comes off a conveyor belt is in fact something you do in the game — the very first level ends with walking through a lab where machines are making robots for you to punch.
Now the only previous Superman game I played was Superman: Shadow of Apokolips, which was kind of… blurry. Or something. I do have LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham and that was fun, but it was mainly because it had a Green Arrow DLC and I was into Stephen Amell at the time. Reasons. I guess. Anyway. Batman there was better than Batman in JL Heroes, who just tends to die a lot. But then again, I don’t know how to play the game.
See, there’s a reason I want the manual for the games. It’s for resale value. Sometimes I read them. I read it tonight to see if it could solve my Batman dying problem and found out about combos and defensive postures and stuff.
I’ve completed the first level; it’s Brainiac, like it always is. There were minibosses and Brainiac himself, or a copy of him. I died a lot, but if I’d read the manual, maybe I wouldn’t have.
With Brainiac on the run and Supes and Bats on the case, it’s up to Zatanna and the Martian Manhunter to handle the ground game, in the sense that now with them the game is a side scrolling brawler and they are on the roofs. That’s fine because each chapter, the story brings in new characters, though eventually I’m told you get to choose who to bring and can get some new characters along the way.
Unlike a lot of games with lots of characters, Justice League Heroes doesn’t level up characters you haven’t played to match the characters you are playing, so having to rotate the characters through all the ones you can possibly have means you can’t just find the one or two you really connect with and focus on them.
JLH is the second to last game Snowblind made as an independent studio before they were swallowed up by a conglomerate and killed, as happens. The last game they made was Lord of the Rings: War in the North, the last hurrah for their famous Dark Alliance game engine. The PS3 had already come out and there wasn’t much of a market for PS2 games, no matter how good, and so the Snowblind Studios story was already coming to an end.
But… I checked my Steam library to make sure… and I have LotR: WotN on Steam. I vaguely remember playing a few minutes of it back in the day — this puts it above all the many, many Steam games I have in my library that I have never played, I guess.
They ported their Dark Alliance game engine to the PS3, Xbox and Windows for this game, and it’s a big step up. I think I’ll play a little bit of that and see which one I want to continue with. I kinda miss being able to create my own character in an RPG. JLH would be way cooler if, like in DC Universe Online, you created your character and the Justice League just helped you out occasionally.
