In the last nine years of LEGO games, we've come to associate the iconic plastic building bricks with not just creativity, but also silly, lighthearted humor. The LEGO Movie Videogame attempts to bring the wonderful film's consistently joyful and entertaining story and heroes into the same gaming format we’ve seen from developer TT Games’ series. But while it delivers some amusing scenarios across diverse terrain, the premise feels overextended. Unlike many recent film-to-game adaptations that deviated from the source material to shake things up, The LEGO Movie Videogame unwisely decides to reenact the film's plot from start to finish. Essentially, it's one lengthy, interactive spoiler, so don't play it before seeing the movie. Main character Emmet's transformation from dopey, upbeat everyman to the fabled carrier of the Piece of Resistance seems like an ideal premise for a game campaign, what with its colorful and distinctive settings (like the adorable, neon-tinged Cloud Cuckoo Land), great cast (including Batman himself), and constant array of gags and jokes.
However, it ends up showing that one of the strengths of other LEGO games is the charm that comes from recreating a non-LEGO scene in amusing ways. This one is just retreading the same material, and there’s not much of it to draw from. Where the strong recent LEGO Marvel and DC games had decades of comics and scads of heroes and villains to work with, The LEGO Movie Videogame has but a single movie script – albeit a pretty excellent one. While the game maintains a generally amusing tone and includes some enjoyable peaks – such as commanding Uni-Kitty's startling alternate form, or bashing through levels as a massive, Transformers-esque robot pirate – trying to turn a succinct, 90-minute film into a seven-hour game campaign means it inevitably drags in spots. Film clips interspersed between missions entertain, but a fair bit of the heart and humor from the film were left on the cutting room floor in editing, so it doesn't quite have the punch of the source material. And some levels are, frankly, boring.
Like the construction site: sure, it follows the arc of the film, but that doesn't mean I need to spend 30 minutes performing virtual plastic manual labor simply to further the prescribed plot. Considering how the film rails against complacency, it's a bit ironic how content the game is to follow the same familiar instructions. TT Games' smash, bash, and solve LEGO game formula is very much intact in The LEGO Movie Videogame, though like all reliable game formats it’s no longer terribly fresh or exhilarating. Luckily, the stellar character roster casts a wide net, with the original characters from the movie flanked by exciting unlockable allies like Gandalf, Wonder Woman, and Superman. However, while it's more interesting to play as Batman or Green Lantern than a generic minifigure, the characters' abilities are most commonly used simply for clearing mundane chains of laborious roadblocks to forward progress. It's thankfully less repetitive with a local split-screen pal in tow (there's no online co-op here), but the action still devolves into drudgery too frequently.
Solutions for opening up a new area of a level or taking down a certain enemy couldn't be more obvious – a cracked panel means Emmet's drill must be used, or a sparkly wall section inevitably leads Wyldstyle or another female character to climb it – and if the visual cue isn't obvious enough, you're often told exactly what to do. Good for kids, sure, but without a strong entertainment franchise to keep older players hooked, it doesn’t provide quite the same all-ages fun this series is known for. There's appeal in exploring the film's colorful locales and commanding such diverse heroes, but having to constantly swap between four or five different characters at a time to complete simple tasks becomes mind numbing quickly. That's not a new complaint for the series, but this game left me with little else to think about. Among the minor new aspects, Emmet's building sequences – in which you flick the analog stick to select the piece that's missing from the design – are a good addition that fit his role well, plus a nice nod to LEGO enthusiasts (the virtual bricks in these scenes look super-realistic, too).
Conversely, Benny the Astronaut's hacking minigame joins the pantheon of dull hacking minigames, with this one taking the form of an undemanding riff on Pac-Man. Otherwise, The LEGO Movie Videogame holds no real surprises, either for fans of the film or the games. Across the PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Wii U, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 versions, the only real differences are minor variations in visual quality. It obviously looks nicer on PCs and the new-generation systems, though it’s not dramatic. I noticed some odd texture flickering in the far-off distance on PlayStation 4, while the PlayStation 3 version has brief spurts of slowdown and occasional visual glitches, and the Xbox 360 release was the fuzziest-looking of the bunch. The presence of off-TV play on the Wii U version will certainly be a boon to anyone with children. (Note that the PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS versions are a completely different game.) The LEGO Movie Videogame extends a concise and hilarious film into a much longer and less consistent interactive experience that sometimes dips into boring territory.
Amusing scenarios and eye-catching environments are a plus, as is the wide unlockable hero roster, but most of the missions feel like an unimaginative retread of the same LEGO game formula. It's solidly enjoyable – but nowhere near awesome.3DS, iPhone/iPad, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Wii U, Xbox 360, Xbox One Mixed or average reviews Mixed or average reviews- based on 33 Ratings More Details and Credits » users found this helpful The LEGO Movie Videogame - Launch Trailer The LEGO Movie Videogame - Official Trailer Neither a good LEGO game nor tribute to the movieat best, The LEGO Movie Videogame is enough fun to be called a functioning promotional product. I didn't so much play The LEGO Movie Videogame as I did gently prod it toward a conclusion. I pushed the buttons that appeared on screen to automatically transform scattered pieces into spaceships and trampolines, performed mindless quick time events, and beat up enemies, though there was never a reason to use anything but the jump attack.
It isn't much different from previous LEGO games. Each character has a special skill or two, and you can switch between them at any time to solve rudimentary puzzles. They also have different attacks, but these weren't different enough to make me choose one over the other.When I was able to do all this without friction, playing along with the intentions of the design, it was enjoyable enough to tolerate. It's colorful and fun to look at in the same way it's fun to look at grand, intricate LEGO displays (and then smash them to bits).For instance, there's a cool, Old West-themed level where my LEGO buddies and I ran from rooftop to rooftop, smashing water towers and reforming them into rickety bridges, and I was able to use the different characters in some interesting ways. At one point, Wyldtyle climbed up a wall and kicked down a ladder so that Vituvius could use his staff to walk across a narrow beam and build a bridge, allowing Emmet to fix generator with his wrench. Meanwhile, a crowd of police robots from below fired laser rifles, filling the sky with hundreds of little red beams.
It's busy, silly, and fun to absorb in a passive way. A highway chase and other set pieces lifted from the movie unfold with minimal input, but with enough style and chaos to be entertaining.Chaotic silliness is The LEGO Movie Videogame's neatest trick. If it doesn't use it, it feels dead and boring. When it uses it too much, however, it becomes obvious that the chaos is just noise that doesn't affect how you play, and the noise gets exhausting. It never finds the right balance.Worse is that the game is at times legitimately broken. A bug that stuck the camera in a forced position left me no choice but to Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Another, in which my character was stuck in the level's geometry, forced me to restart. Both happened in my first hour with the game, and required me to repeat the same 15 to 20 minutes of gameplay.These bugs, however, manage to be less frustrating than instances when the game is just poorly designed. Whenever I would run around in circles trying to figure out how to keep prodding things along, I wasn't sure if it was a glitch or if I was too dumb to figure it out.
It usually turned out that the game just expected me to know things I had no way of knowing.By far the most maddening example of this is near the end of the game, where I was piloting a giant mech and needed to destroy a huge pipe that blocked the street. The pipe was cracked in such a way that it's obvious that it needed to be smashed, but beating it up didn't help. Moments before, I was taught that the mech could pick up cars and toss them, but these did nothing either. Finally, through desperation and a little luck, I discovered that the only way to break the pipe was to backtrack (something you rarely need to do) and pick up a very specific car, in a way that was different than the method I was just taught. I'm fuming just remembering it.If it weren't for the interspersed footage from the movie, I would have thought that the LEGO games had reached a point where they're more or less photorealistic—they look like LEGO. But what makes the movie so much more visually interesting is that it represents LEGO as I actually remember it from my childhood.
A little scuffed, a little broken and clunky. Juxtaposed with this, the game seems lifeless, without history, with factory fresh pieces.Another inadvertent downside to the source material is that it negates a lot of the what was inherently endearing about previous LEGO games. There was a parody to their portrayals, a self-aware smoothing over of the most dramatic scenes in Star Wars or The Lord of The Rings. A character's tragic death was transformed into comedy, and part of the fun was watching memorable moments reimagined in LEGO.That appeal is missing from The LEGO Movie Videogame because its source material is already LEGO. There's no satire, no creative value to the reinterpretation, just lifeless imitation which carries over just enough quality from the previous LEGO games to be entertaining. But unlike the LEGO games which compliment the brands they're clothed in, all I can see here is the black suit and tie of an executive.It's right there in the title: “The LEGO Movie Videogame” is a description of marketing.