Published on April 21st, 2014 | Summary: It’s certainly not as ‘awesome’ as its movie counterpart but there’s some genuine fun to be had with this The Lego Movie Videogame Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment Available on: PS4 (Reviewed), PS3, PSVita, X360, XBOne, WiiU, 3DS, PC Although I’m a huge fan of the Lego video game franchise I am aware that the formula is becoming a bit stale; run through a level, break stuff, find hidden items and collect studs over and over again. With the release of The Lego Movie (which is incredible and you should see it) it is no surprise that a video game has been released. While I was expecting even more of the same from developer Traveller’s Tales there are actually some new elements not found in other Lego games, but unfortunately the rest of the game lacks the depth of previous games. Without spoiling too much of the movie’s plot, which the game pretty much follows to a tee, you play as Emmett Brickowski, a harmless and uninteresting construction worker living in Bricksburg (this is about as meta as a franchise can get) who gets mistaken as “The Special,” the person who’s legacy is to save all the different Lego universes from the reign of Lord Business.
While it closely follows the movie’s plot it is still heavily edited and concise, which is why I highly recommend seeing the movie before even considering touching this game. It helps that the game features actual scenes ripped right from the movie which look great and fit in well with the action, a nice touch if you enjoyed the movie’s story. As I mentioned before the core gameplay is exactly the same as other entries in the series but there are some nifty new elements. In some levels you are required to collect instruction pages in order to build different objects. Once you accomplish this a mini puzzle game is activated in which you have to match the missing pieces from a Lego construction in order to complete it. I enjoyed these segments, as I am a fan of the Lego toys and the challenge of putting some of them together, but of course there’s no way that the game would let me sit there for two hours putting together a mini-figure police car, so it’s an extremely basic addition to the game.
Kudos however for adding a new element that expands upon the Lego universe, and I hope that more depth is added if included in future releases. In previous Lego game releases such as Lord of the Rings and Marvel Super Heroes there are giant open world environments filled with side quests and mini-games for players to complete once they’re done with the main story. The Lego Movie Videogame surprisingly has only three side quests in the entire game, and it features a rather large environment for players to explore so it feels like the developers may have been under some time constraints and didn’t include these. The Lego Movie Videogame won’t win any new fans for the series but there are some fresh gameplay ideas on display that can be even better if further expanded upon in future releases. It’s certainly not as ‘awesome’ as its movie counterpart but for people who enjoyed the movie enough to play the game, there’s some genuine fun to be had with this.Warner Bros. can’t even wait for the final film to turn The Hobbit movies into Lego games, but was there really any need for such a rush?
The concept of having too much of a good thing is not one the video games industry seems very aware of. This is the second major Lego game released this year, following The Lego Movie in February and before that Lego Marvel Super Heroes in November. And that’s not counting Lego Friends on DS and 3DS, which was also released last week, and a continuous stream of iOS apps. We love Lego, and Lego games, more than most but there are limits and Lego The Hobbit is pushing them almost beyond breaking point. Although Lego The Hobbit’s release date has obviously been timed to coincide with the release of the second movie on DVD that means that the third film isn’t a part of the game at all, and will have to be added in later as downloadable content. Given how bunched up the releases have been lately it seems incredible that Warner Bros. couldn’t have just waited until the final movie was released this Christmas, which would surely have been a more advantageous thing to coincide with than just the DVD release.
Trying to imagine why they haven’t have done that, one of the obvious guesses is it’s because they’ve got yet more new Lego games, based on other themes, waiting to come out later in the year. We’d also like to think that the next game after this will make some proper use of the next gen consoles, as Lego The Hobbit is clearly designed with last gen technology in mind and often feels like little more than a fan mod of 2012’s Lego The Lord Of The Rings. The all-Lego environments from The Lego Movie game are now just generic video game backgrounds again and the humour has regressed back to little more than people falling over and dropping things. You could argue that it’s the nature of the films this is based on, but the signature charm and whimsy of other Lego games is at a low ebb here. Seeing little Lego characters speak the dialogue from the films was funny for The Lord Of The Rings; but having less charismatic characters repeat less memorable dialogue, in situations that are already less gravely serious just doesn’t have the same impact.
It’s also hard not to notice that the game has exactly the same problem as the movies, in that many of its sequences are far too reminiscent of The Lord Of The Rings, except never quite as interesting. The first part of the encounter with stone giants on the Misty Mountains plays out almost identically in style to the Misty Mountains level in the Lord Of The Rings game. The flashback sequence with the dwarf king is handled exactly the same as the flashback at the start of Lord Of The Rings, andso on, and so on. Of course all the Lego games are fundamentally the same, and although some have their own unique ideas it’s just as much the nature of the licence that dictates how enjoyable they are. A key necessity is lots of memorable, named characters with unique abilities. That’s where something like Lego Pirates Of The Caribbean struggled but where Star Wars and the superhero games excel. Middle-earth fits the formula well enough, with all the different dwarves having their own weapons and equipment, but there’s a lack of visual variety and the game doesn’t do enough to help you remember who has what item.
We’re not sure we ever remembered more than one or two of the names, which meant most of our play time was spent as ‘the fat one’, ‘the one with the bow and arrow’, and ‘James Nesbitt’. There’s even a tacit admission of this in that one of the game’s key new features is the ability to ‘buddy up’, where you tag a nearby dwarf and then control both characters as one to attack larger enemies and destroy larger obstacles. That’s not exactly pardaigm-shifting stuff though and neither is the idea of collecting loot from defeated enemies and smashed objects. There’s over a dozen of these, from gold bars to carrots, and you need a certain amount to complete many of the game’s side quests and to create specific objects (using the same spot the missing brick mini-game from The Lego Movie tie-in). You could generously call it a crafting system but since you’re constantly bashing the same objects to also get normal Lego studs it doesn’t really change the gameplay focus at all.
There’s also an expansion of the blueprint system from The Lord Of The Rings that lets you forge extra equipment – from the useful to the absurd – but again it’s the inventory equivalent of busywork. That means the minute-to-minute gameplay is the same as always, as you smash apart everything in your path and solve a series of convoluted but never very difficult, puzzles. The tactile joy of breaking apart Lego objects is as addictive as ever, while the two player co-op remains one of the best ways to enjoy a game with a non-gamer or young child while still keep both parties entertained. The other common feature to all Lego games is the large number of bugs and glitches, but like the Lego Movie game the problem is less pronounced here than in previous titles. Like most of the recent Lego games there’s also large open world environment to explore, although unlike The Lord Of The Rings it doesn’t take in the whole of Middle-Earth – just the parts that were actually in The Hobbit.
Developer TT Games stop themselves from just copying and pasting the world from the last game but still some areas are almost identical, with clearly a lot of reused assets. You could argue that was unavoidable since it is meant to be the same world, but given the nature of the game and the films it just adds even more to the overpowering sense of déjà vu. If you’ve never played a Lego game before, or you really like The Hobbit movies, then by all means add another point to the score below. But if this really is your first it’s not hard at all to find another that’s funnier, more inventive, and less predictable. In Short: One of the weakest Lego games of recent times, and not just because the formula is getting old but because The Hobbit isn’t a particularly good fit for it. Pros: The co-op formula is still as entertaining as ever and there’s plenty of content here even without the last film. Competent storytelling, compared to most movie tie-ins. Cons: Exactly the same core gameplay as usual, but with less distinctive characters and a game world that is familiar in all the wrong ways.