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.

At the beginning, available playing characters are Iron Man and Hulk, soon joined by Spider-Man. Other characters are made available by advancing in game, and other ones by collecting Gold Bricks. Gold bricks can be found exploring Manhattan, completing side quests there, as well as story mode levels: by them, additional characters are unlocked as well as bonus levels. Extra outfits and vehicles are obtained retrieving Character tokens and Vehicle tokens in Manhattan. Other collectibles are Minikits, Deadpool bricks (by which some power-ups and extra features are obtained). Some characters are available through purchase of the Super Pack and Asgard Pack DLCs (the former ones, taken from Marvel's film Thor: The Dark World were available as pre-order bonus, also), purchasable on Xbox LIVE, PS Store and PC. Playable characters total to around 150, more than 100 needing to be unlocked. They all have their own Super Powers, regarding possibility of interaction with the environment, and Super Moves, regarding how enemies can be beaten.

In-game dialogues are all voice-acted by a cast of 27 people. On Wii U, game is playable without a tv, by GamePad off-tv play feature. In two-player mode, one of the two players can use GamePad's display, and the other the display, so avoiding split screen.