Lego Marvel Super Heroes is an action game, reuniting about one hundred and a half Marvel heroes and villains coming from several Marvel franchises, having the player control the good ones in order to save the Earth from a team of the vicious (headed by Galactus, also named as The Devourer of the Worlds); all in the fashion of LEGO adventures blocky cartoonish visual style and gameplay.

Game world consists of Manhattan as explorable open world and game's hub — including known Marvel locales such as the Marvel HQ — plus a series of self-standing story mode levels located beyond Earth, in the worlds of Asgard, Bifrost, and Asteroid M. Marvel-related buildings in New York can be entered, and for each of them there is a storyline, narrated by Deadpool.