The LEGO Movie is awesome! If you haven’t already seen it, I suggest you stop reading this review, go to your nearest cinema, buy a ticket and prepare to laugh your arse off for an hour and half. If you don’t believe me, check out our review of it here.
OK, are you back? All laughed out? Got the film’s theme playing on a loop?
Good, because if you haven’t seen the movie there’s absolutely no point playing the Game of the Movie of the Bricks. The reasons for this are two fold
1) The LEGO Movie Videogame’s 15 chapters retell the events of the movie and contains cut down snippets of various key scenes that contain a truckload of spoilers, as well as some of the film’s best jokes.
2) Like every other game in the LEGO series based on a movie, a lot of your potential enjoyment derived from the game comes from seeing some of your favourite scenes from the movie recreated in an interactive manner, I would say in LEGO but in this particular instance, it’s a moot point.
In short, if you haven’t seen the movie the game doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But I’m happy to report that unlike your average movie tie in game, The LEGO Movie Videogame isn’t merely a cynical cash grab. Or if it is, it hides it really, really well. As overall, it is another, perfectly entertaining LEGO game. That, although not as robust as some other entries in the series, does continues to refine the formula set down by the other games that preceded it.
If you have ever played any other game in the series you’ll know exactly what to expect from The LEGO Movie Videogame: A delightful mix of character based puzzle solving, simple platforming and smashing everything in sight to collect enough studs to fill the meter and be deemed ‘The Special’.
Over the course of the game’s 8-10 hour campaign, you’ll guide Emmet, Wyldstyle, Vitruvius, Batman, Princess Unikitty, Metal Beard and 86 other unlockable characters from the movie, on their quest to fulfil the prophecy to stop President Business and his army of robots from unleashing his doomsday weapon, the Kragle, on Taco Tuesday. Taking in sights such as, the LEGO City inspired Bricksburg and the trippy and anarchic Cloud Cuckoo land.
Just like the film, everything in the game is made out of LEGO, which weirdly is a first for the series, as up until this point, although the worlds of the various games were populated with LEGO characters, vehicles and the occasional shrubbery, the environments themselves often weren’t. I hope this change makes its way into future games as it has allowed Travellers Tales to increase the level of interactivity with the games environments especially the level of destruction. Another nice by-product of this change is that the world of the game meshes to create a much more convincing whole.
Along with revamped environments, the game also finds novel ways to tie in the different abilities of the game’s main cast. Notably the differences between how Emmet and the Master Builders construct things. For example, Emmet can’t use the usual piles of jumping bricks that you’ll build into something useful. If you hold B he’ll stack them, look sad and then just shrug. However, unlike the Master Builders, Emmet can follow instructions found throughout the world to build predesigned vehicles and other useful items via a mini game in which you have to choose the right brick for each level of the design. Watching the objects coming together as each layer falls into place before eventually springing to life is incredibly cool.
Conversely, Master Builders like Wyldstyle and Batman can build using jumping brick piles as well target groups of three predetermined parts of the scenery to rip apart and then rebuild into all kinds of cool contraptions and vehicles from the movie, there’s even an achievement for having Benny build a SPACESHIP! in the later stages of the game.
As such, the game is a fantastic movie tie in, deftly recreating much of the wit and whimsy that made the film such a joy to watch. However, as a LEGO game it falls down because of its symbiotic relationship with the movie, this is in no way the fault of Travellers Tales. In fact they should be applauded for managing to construct a relatively entertaining adventure out of one 90 minute film. The main problem is with pacing, as the elements and scenes of the film, save for its finale, that the game uses as its mains sources of inspiration are only a couple of minutes in the film but are stretched often stretched to half hour chunks in the game. As such, certain sections feel like unnecessary filler, and somewhat disjointed as a result.
The game’s various hub worlds you’ll travel back to between levels feel disconnected from the action of the campaign itself. For example at one point you’ll be booted from a level back to a burning cloud cuckoo land even though within the campaign Emmet and co had already left the place far behind. This stands in stark comparison to the silky smooth transition from over world to levels seen in the likes of LEGO City Undercover and LEGO Marvel Superheroes. Although maybe this is an unfair comparison, given that they had the entirety of the Marvel universe to play with in their last game and Traveller’s Tales only point of reference for The LEGO Movie Videogame is a single 90 minute film. Despite these constraints, they’ve still managed to produce an entertaining romp and a fine tie in, just make sure to check your expectations at the door.
