Midweek Madness: Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number £2.99/ €3.74/ $3.74 (75% off), all othe editions, packs, upgrades and DLC are also 75% of. PC, PS4, Reviews, Wii U, Xbox One LEGO Jurassic World is roughly the 25th game that developer Traveller’s Tales has created with the LEGO license, most of which consist of family friendly, co-op enabled adventure games much like this one. With such a large number of titles being released across multiple platforms over the past 10 years, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve played one of these LEGO titles yourself. As the series has aged, more mechanics and features have been implemented that expand the overall enjoyability of the series for those of us that have played multiple entries. But there’s almost always a point where the series seems to fall stagnant to some degree before becoming revitalized. LEGO Jurassic World isn’t quite to that point, but considering LEGO Avengers and LEGO Dimensions are right around the corner, I really, strongly hope that Traveller’s Tales is holding back some more interesting innovations for those future releases.
LEGO Jurassic World isn’t a bad game, not by any means, but from a game mechanics angle it’s certainly well-tread territory. The gameplay consists of switching between multiple characters taken from the Jurassic Park and World license, revisiting highlight moments across all four films, destroying every breakable LEGO object across dozens of stages, and using the collected LEGO studs to buy new characters. There’s hidden gold bricks and other objects, and some form of replayability due to the new characters you unlock. Those characters may come equipped with a special ability you might not have had access to on previous stages, so you’ll revisit those stages to unlock new areas and discover hidden collectibles. None of this is any different than the majority of the LEGO adventure titles Traveller’s Tales has produced thus far, and these basic gameplay tenets have been refined over the years to the point that it would be difficult for Traveller’s Tales to screw up the formula.
Despite the overall repetition and familiarity, it’s hard to deny the enjoyment smashing bricks and collecting items can bring. Even now, having played most of their LEGO library, I still feel compelled to see each and every release to the end, and LEGO Jurassic World is no different. Some of that is thanks in part to the license being used, but the gameplay is also pretty enjoyable, more so if you can bring a friend along for the ride with local co-op. Your mileage may vary depending on how tired you are with the LEGO formula, but if you enjoy both LEGO titles and Jurassic Park/World, I think there’s enough here to keep you interested. My only serious complaint this time around is that the spliced in clips of voice acting from the films feels strange here. Around the time of LEGO Batman 2, Traveller’s Tales began to intro voice acting into their games. For the non-film properties, the majority of the voice acting was unique to the game. But film-based properties have generally used either voice clips, or a mix of voice clips and new material.
LEGO Jurassic World does this to some degree. Owen Grady, the character played by Chris Pratt in World, has some one-liners and other comments that seem to be unique to the game. But every time a voice clip from one of the films is piped in, it’s super noticeable, and the sound quality is sort of at odds with the soundtrack or other voices. It’s jarring, quite frankly, and sounds somewhat poor on the Xbox One version I’m reviewing here. I doubt that it’s a system specific issue though, and it’s an unfortunate mark against a game that otherwise sounds fine. Barring this noticeable issue, I think LEGO Jurassic World is a perfectly serviceable example of Traveller’s Tales current take on the LEGO license. It’s fun to revisit events from the past four films, and there’s a hefty amount of comedic moments that take the edge off the more horrific and visceral moments found in the films. It’s not the best LEGO game I’ve played thus far, and as mentioned earlier, I think Traveller’s Tales needs to start either changing the formula considerably, or adding to the series in some noticeable fashion going forward.
But for now, if you want to scratch either your LEGO or Jurassic Park/World itch, this game will do that nicely.In Lego Jurassic World you’ll go deep into the most action-filled moments of all four Jurassic movies, exploring the jungle landscapes, futuristic technology and plenty of spooky dinosaurs. But is the game any good? One thing for sure, it will get your adrenaline pumping. You’ll start at a desert dinosaur site where you use machines to find fossils and build them into skeletons. It’s ingenious that once you uncover the dinosaur skeleton, you use it to climb to a different area. A dust cloud appears, a helicopter lands and soon whisks you away to Jurassic Park. And the park is awesome. As you proceed, you get to eyeball an intricate jungle environment complete with a splashing, realistic waterfall. I wanted to swim up to the waterfall to see if there was something cool hidden behind it. Instead, my character drowned and respawned on the banks of a lagoon. Soon, you help a Triceratops back to health … by examiningits poop.
In fact, you dive right into huge piles of dung to check out what’s in there. Once you feed the dinosaur veggies you find, the beast becomes yours to control. There’s nothing cooler than feeling as if you are a dinosaur. You can charge through amber-colored wooded areas, knock down trees to form bridges and generally enjoy this awesome new power of prehistoric strength. After the Triceratops knocked down the tree, I encountered my first major glitch. While trying to walk over the tree, one of my characters dropped into the creek below. She could not get out, no matter what I tried. You actually may not encounter this bug. But to me, it was completely annoying. I had to restart and lost about an hour of gameplay time (because I stop to pick up every Lego stud piece as I go). As in other Lego games, you’ll be witness to a large cast of characters. But these aren’t that iconic, and certainly not as familiar and fun to play as Marvel or DC comics superheroes. Each possesses a certain ability, everything from fixing computers to shooting targets to cutting rope and vines.
These powers help you solve puzzles (like opening giant gates) in the particular section you’re moving through. But it’s the dinosaurs that rule the roost. Raptors are fast, agile and can build things. The big Brachiosaursus stomps really hard. The Dilophosaurus spews poison. There are about 20 of these creatures, and you’ll love playing as all of them. But it’s the T-Rex that rocks the most. You use him like a bull in a china shop to break up everything in an area, including an energy core. While sections load, you’ll learn lots of dinosaur facts. It’s smart of the developers to give you a small dose of education as you play. One particular nugget of information even compares the height of a Brachiosaurus to thousands of Lego minifigs stacked one upon the other. The palpable terror that you sometimes see in the series of movies is replaced by humor, the chuckle-out-loud kind. (Lego games never take themselves too seriously.) Here, characters are often bumbling and a dinosaur might show up wearing a ski cap.