It’s a another day and Just2Good is again at it with reveals for the 2015 LEGO sets and this time the LEGO Disney Princess sets get their spotlight. It looks like there are only four sets in this wave but there are some new Disney Princesses added for next year including Elsa and Anna from Frozen which I think will be a very popular set. It’s also a shame that Aladdin wasn’t included in the Jasmine’s Exotic Adventure considering that previous LEGO Disney Princess sets also had the male lead characters in it. Jasmine’s Exotic Adventure (41061) Elsa’s Sparkling Ice Palace (41062) Ariel’s Undersea Palace (41063)Uh-oh, it looks like your Internet Explorer is out of date. For a better shopping experience, please upgrade now. This espari Wooden Bedroom Set is bound to add hours of fun and playtime to your espari collection. It is a must have because every espari doll is special and needs a beautiful bedroom set to live in! Set even has hand painted floral detail.
A Barnes & Noble exclusive. Wooden bedroom set includes: Built in desk with chair 8 shelves for storage Comes with blanket, doll bedding, 2 pillows and shag rug WARNING: Choking Hazard - Small Parts. Not suitable for children under 3 years old. WARNING: Adult assembly required. Most Helpful Customer Reviews See all customer reviewsThe Force Awakens finally gets a video game adaptation, but does this latest Lego game manage to construct any new ideas? It’s now over a decade since the release of Lego Star Wars: The Video Game. A recreation of the three prequel movies with Lego minifigures and models, at the time it was expected to be only a minor release – a novelty that would only appeal to small children. Today it’s one of the most successful, and prolific, video game franchises in the world. But surprisingly it’s been five years since the last Lego Star Wars title, and since the other Lego movie games haven’t changed much in that time the responsibility for refreshing the formula now falls to the movie franchise that started it all…
What’s also surprising is that this is the first console game to be based on The Force Awakens. Star Wars: Battlefront does feature the desert planet of Jakku, but 20 years before the events of the movie and with none of the familiar characters or vehicles. In fact, EA hasn’t confirmed any sequel trilogy games at all yet, even though presumably some of their forthcoming titles will be set in that time period. That no doubt explains why Warner Bros. has been allowed such a surprising amount of access to the movie’s cast, with almost everyone reprising their roles and recording new dialogue – even Harrison Ford. We’ll get to the new features in a moment, but in terms of the basic gameplay and structure this is still pretty much the same as it was back in 2005. Your little minifigures run around shooting, punching, or lightsabering hapless Stormtroopers, as you complete various Lego-based puzzles against fixed camera backdrops. Ideally you’ll do so with a friend, as offline co-op has always been one of the games’ key appeals – especially given how approachable they are for non-gamers.
It always feels odd to defend an overused formula but, like James Bond or superhero films, some work so well they become like comfort food, where only a small deviation or gimmick is needed to keep your interest. In this case one of the major new gimmicks is, of all things, a cover-based shooting system. Obviously it’s not exactly Gears Of War, but anyone with a gun can get behind cover and then pop out to aim at enemies. It’s simplistic – if your aim’s that bad you can just press the left trigger to auto-target – but it works perfectly well as a sort of ‘my first third person shooter’ for kids or less experienced adults. The other big new feature is the ability to build more than one object out of a single pile of Lego, by going up to it and breaking it down to its component parts again. This helps to sell the idea that you’re playing with real Lego and gives something for the bad guys to aim at, rather than just ineffectually shooting at you all the time. Although the boast of more advanced artificial intelligence doesn’t really amount to anything else other than Stormtroopers occasionally calling in reinforcements.
Vehicle sections, so often a low point of Lego games, have also undergone a rethink and now often take place in small open world areas. The ones where one person is piloting and the other is manning the guns are particularly good, if both players know what they’re doing. The other positive is the game’s sense of humour, which is obviously not a new feature but still a key attraction. The physical comedy is aimed at the particularly young, but there’s plenty to amuse adults too, including gags about everything from Stormtroopers’ aiming to Harrison Ford breaking his leg and what Kylo Ren’s bedroom looks like. Rather than overfamiliarity, the two major knocks against Lego The Force Awakens are not really its fault at all. The first is that with only one film to work with (the other Lego Star Wars games have always adapted three films at a time or multiple cartoon episodes) the plot is stretched out to breaking point. The game realises this and adds in extra stories taken from the expanded universe, such as how Han and Chewie caught the rathtars or rescuing Admiral Ackbar.
These are amongst the best bits in the game but they’re very short and take a frustrating amount of time to unlock. The other problem is that we still enjoyed Lego Dimensions more, despite its gameplay being arguably simpler (although it does have much better boss battles). But its mixing of properties does much more to give an illusion of variety than the shallow new gimmicks of Lego The Force Awakens. To be honest, we’d be much more interested in seeing Star Wars added to Lego Dimensions than another standalone game – and that may well happen next year, now that Disney Infinity is no more. In fact, you can’t help thinking that The Force Awakens would’ve been much better suited to one of the new style of larger Lego Dimensions expansions. The upcoming one for the new Ghostbusters has six levels and seems to be fairly substantial, which appears to be a much better fit for a single film adaptation. But those decisions are, we’re sure, well outside of the developer’s control and this is still one of the best standalone Lego games of recent years, just a notch below Lego Marvel Super Heroes (not to be confused with the inferior Lego Marvel’s Avengers) and on par with Lego Batman 3.