When an archaeologist is kidnapped the kids of the young Justice League are dispatched against The Light, using their powers to battle through legions of bad guys...

Young Justice: Legacy is a squad game based on the cartoon of the same name. Depending on how you feel, this is either a game of passing interest for fans of the show or a missed opportunity for something really special.

Although the characters mimic their cartoon versions well, as one would expect, and the backgrounds are suitably detailed, it does not take you long to discover that this is not an open world game. There are secret areas to discover, but essentially you follow the path set out in the game. This can seem a bit unusual as you come across surfaces which you instinctively know you should be able to climb and areas which, frustratingly, do not let you enter. If you pay attention you also quickly discover that the area which intercepts your character and the landscape is bigger than it looks, sometimes leading your character to appear to be suspended in mid-air.

The games has a lot more in common, in game play and feel, to the BEN 10 games than it does to the more open world experiences of either DC online or the LEGO games. Now this would generally make you think that the game is aimed at young adults and I’m sure that’s what the developers had in mind, but under the hood of a seemingly innocuous game is quite a challenge.

The controls can be a little fiddly to begin with as each character has a number of attacks, including their specialist moves, but concentrate and it soon becomes second nature. One of the nice things about the game is the need for strategy. Sure your characters are powerful but so are your adversaries, so rushing in without using your advantages of things like range is likely to get you killed really quickly. Even with this in mind the game has the tendency to reduce down to button mashing.

All this mashing will get you levelled up and the ability to gain further enhancements, useful as the game progresses and the challenges become harder. In line with the other Cartoon Network games completion time is between five and six hours, not a great deal of time and there is little replay value here.

Apparently the game was written by the animated show's writing team and so should tie in well with the cancelled show. Not having caught the show I did not feel that any prior knowledge was required. Anyone with a passing acquaintance with superheroes should feel right at home. The story is supposed to fill in the gaps between the show's first and second season.

You can play across the game's fifteen levels alone or with two other players, either in the same room or across the internet. This aspect of the game does increase the pleasure of playing it, introducing another level of strategy. As a single player game your two other team mates do tend to charge ahead, into danger, requiring you to regularly revive them when they are knocked out.

If the game has a real problem it is with the number of characters you get to play with, initially only six, Nightwing, Superboy (whose abilities are underwhelming), Aqualad, Kid Flash, Miss Martian and Artemis. Each have their own special moves, but there is not enough variety to make much of a difference. You can get more through beating the game and DLC’s but I’m not sure that there is enough here to make you play through more than once.

It may be damming the game with faint praise to say that it’s not bad and will while away five or six hours, but you will have to get over some of the game's oddities, the most pronounce of which are the treasure chests you find, which open, but appear to give you nothing obvious.

It’s probably worth picking up if you’re a fan of the show or you can find the game cheaply.

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Charles Packer