Xbox One, 360, PS3, PS4, Wii U, 3DS, PS Vita No forum activity yet. Start a discussion about The Lego Movie VideogameSince 2005, the developers at Traveller’s Tales have been mining video game gold with their Lego-themed movie spoofs. It started with Stars Wars and then expanded to Harry Potter, Indiana Jones and Lord of the Rings, with some Marvel and DC comics superheroes thrown in for fun. It was a no-brainer, then, that Warner Bros. would tap the British studio to do a tie-in for its Lego movie. Lo and behold, both hit on the same day: Feb. 7. The game’s story follows the movie’s closely, beginning with a showdown between the evil Lord Business (voiced in the film by Will Ferrell) and the blind wizard Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman) over a mysterious artifact known as the Kragle. With Business dispatching his foe, the scene shifts to Emmett Brickowski, a lowly construction worker in the big city who wants nothing more than to fit in. To do so, he must “follow the instructions” of his society, which include watching the same TV shows as everyone else – including the apparently hilarious comedy “Where’s My Pants?” – and periodically singing along to the insipidly catchy song, “Everything is Awesome” with his co-workers.
Before long, Emmett meets an enigmatic girl named WyldStyle (Elizabeth Banks) who takes him on an exciting adventure where he learns to live life beyond the instruction book. They travel to new, exotic Lego lands, including the Old West, Cloud Cuckoo Land and Lord Business’ headquarters in Octan Tower. The duo pick up new partners along the way, including the quick-to-anger unicorn/cat Unikitty (Alison Brie), the ornery cyborg pirate Metalbeard (Nick Offerman) and, of course, Batman (Will Arnett) who, we learn, “only works in black… and sometimes dark grey.”All the elements are fun, and yet, there’s something slightly off about The Lego Movie Videogame. While each previous movie-themed game brought with it a fresh cartoonish sensibility that spoofed, parodied and otherwise monkeyed around with its source material, this instalment is extraordinarily straight-laced.What laughs there are come almost entirely from clips of the movie, which makes it feel like the developers didn’t have much time – or perhaps the mandate – to come up with their own take.
That would hardly be a surprise, given that this is the sixth Lego game the studio has released since the beginning of 2013. As such, if you haven’t first seen the movie, you might not get the jokes.As with previous Lego games, this one explores the locales of its source material with well-crafted levels full of puzzles that can only be overcome through a combination of the characters’ abilities. Emmett, for example, can fix broken machines with his wrench or dig up holes with his jackhammer. Wyldstyle, meanwhile, can jump to high ledges while Batman – besides just being Batman – can hit switches with his Batarang and pull items with his grapple-gun.In this way, the game fills in some of the unseen moments of the movie, such as when Emmett and crew try to build a submarine to escape from the clutches of Bad Cop (Liam Neeson) and his robot goons, or when they create a giant mech from construction vehicles.There are a few new features, including the “Master Build” ability. Just about every character can stand on glowing green circles found within each level and visualize how to use surrounding Lego pieces to build new tools or vehicles that can be used to proceed.
Emmett is one of the few who doesn’t initially have this capability, since he’s been trained to only follow instructions.On the flip side, most levels require players to find instruction pages to build required items, and Emmett is the only one who can interpret those. Doing so kicks off a mini-game where the player must guess the next piece required. Similarly, another mini-game sees Astronaut Benny (Charlie Day) hack computers through a Pac-Man-like interface.There’s further variety too – most of it well done – such as the rail-shooter sequence in the Old West where the heroes are pursued in a stage coach, or a scene where the giant Metalbeard takes on a horde of smaller enemies. If you’ve played even a few of the many previous Lego games, the feeling of been-there-done-that will be hard to escape. But these small, new additions give this latest entry some degree of differentiation.The voice acting is also fantastic and amazingly authentic. The game uses sound-alikes of the film’s respective voice actors and just about all of them are spot-on (especially whoever is doing Morgan Freeman).
It’s just too bad the stand-ins weren’t given more unique material to work with.The Lego Movie Videogame is surprisingly short, with the main storyline taking only about six hours to complete. Of course, there are plenty more hours waiting for players who want to seek out all the hidden items and puzzles through each level’s free play mode, which is unlocked when it’s completed in the main story. But even then, there are fewer collectibles and new characters to find than in previous Lego games, while the open-world hubs in between levels are also much smaller. It seems clear the developers were under significant time constraints to finish this game.Still, The Lego Movie Videogame isn’t a cheap cinematic cash-in. While it doesn’t measure up to Traveller’s Tales masterpiece, last year’s Lego City Undercover for the Wii U, and it doesn’t live up to its theme song – where “everything is awesome” – it is indeed a colourful and fun puzzler that’s sure to please fans.
But you’ll probably want to see the movie first. 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.