Wolverine, Spider-Man, Hulk, Thor, Iron Man. Who doesn’t love at least one of these characters? These comic book superheroes have become such an integral part of our lives that they’re practically legendary. As kids, we wanted to be them (and often dressed as them for Halloween). As teens, we couldn’t part with their respective toys because we considered them to be “collectors’ items.” And as adults we flock to movie theaters every summer to see them on the big screen. So how, I ask you, could we ever not love them?

The answer might be found within Marvel Super Hero Squad, a new action game for Wii. There are several playable characters (including the aforementioned superheroes), many stages, and lots of enemies to destroy, but none of that is half as important as the overbearing reality that we have already seen and played everything this game has to offer.

The Golden Button

We all know what the A button looks like. We’ve all pressed it many times before. Still, it has to be said that if you’re going to play Marvel Super Hero Squad, you should double-check your Wii remote and make sure that you do, in fact, know exactly where the A button is located.

Though you can use other buttons to execute a jump or alternate attack, the A button is your primary defense. In truth, it’s the only button you need to defeat enemies, to win arena battles (where four superheroes and/or super villains face off against each other in a lousy 3D version of Smash Bros.), and to get through almost every stage.

All too quickly, this amounts to hundreds of times that A button must be pressed. Before you know it, you’ll be into the thousands. How can I be so sure? Because after spending a good 60 minutes pressing the A button and nothing else, I started to count my button taps. After three minutes, I had pushed the A button at least 200 times! That’s more than one A button per second, and while not every press may have been necessary (button-mashing games tend to foster player responses that lead to more button taps than are needed for each combo), the number is still exorbitant.

If you don’t press the A button, what else is there to do? You can switch between the two characters that you’re playing with, but their powers are nothing special, and their combos are all the same. So you push the A button, destroy an endless flood of enemies, and hope and wait for something monumental to happen.

For all of that, what does the game deliver? Another group of enemies, and thus another reason to press the A button several dozen more times.

Missing the Mark

There are a couple of games that made button-mashing fun, but Marvel Super Hero Squad isn’t one of them. In addition to being one of the most repetitive games of the year, it is also one of the most mechanically challenged, featuring an auto-controlled camera that gets stuck in awkward positions, and playable characters that can get stuck in weird areas of a level that the camera won’t let you see properly. The level designs are just as lame as the game’s use of the A button; in short, the layout is the equivalent to a cardboard box that has walls inside of it and arrows telling you where to go. The visuals aren’t any better; they too are bogged by generic, below-Wii-standards ugliness. It’s one thing to have cartoon aesthetics with accentuated character designs – it is wholly another to paint them in polygons that look like they came from a console released years before the Wii was announced.

Marvel Super Hero Squad brags about its drop-in/drop-out co-op, but don’t get too excited; it’s offline-only and doesn’t make the camera, control or gameplay issues any less problematic. The game also brags about its four-player battle mode (same as the arena battles in the single-player mode), which allows you to compete in free-for-all, two-on-two and three-on-one battles. This might be a tantalizing feature in a button-masher that rocked. But let’s not forget that these are commonplace elements that you can expect from any game of this kind – good or bad.

Very often you can put aside a game’s flaws because, underneath all the havoc and hogwash, the game is fun, exciting, or just plain cool. Innovation is certainly a head-turner that’s capable of retaining players even when the game is lacking on the whole. Sadly, there is nothing in Marvel Super Hero Squad that allows such a scenario to develop. I can’t recommend it to older Marvel fans because of the repetition and the frustration; I can’t recommend it to kids for those same reasons. Beyond the recommendation, it is highly likely that every person who reads this review already has a game just like Marvel Super Hero Squad sitting in their collection. It may not have the Marvel license attached, but who cares? In all but the rarest of cases, a video-game license isn’t all that different from beauty, which is only skin deep.

Gameplay: 4.0
Repetitive, clunky and predictable, Marvel Super Hero Squad is a button-mashing mess.

Graphics: 4.0
The goofy character designs might have been acceptable if they weren't washed out and didn't move so clunky. But even then you'd have the backgrounds to look at, which are awful, and the misguided auto-camera, which is unbearably annoying.

Sound: 5.0
Less annoying than the hideous character designs, but still nothing you'd want to listen to.

Difficulty: Easy
How difficult is it to press the A button?

Concept: 1.0
Marvel Super Hero Squad is a button-masher with a big-name license attached. In other words, it's a sleep-inducing, we've-all-seen-it-before idea that has been executed with zero polish.

Multiplayer: 4.0
Four thumbs. Four A buttons. Four zillion times that button will be tapped.

Overall: 4.0
There are many, many great kids games out there, including those with powerful licenses attached. Just look at The Secret Saturdays: Beasts of the 5th Sun or the recent Ice Age game. Marvel Super Hero Squad, however, should be avoided.