Here’s our family guide to Lego Jurassic World. Lego Jurassic World is a new entry in the popular series of Lego adaptations of existing franchises. Like the others, it’s an action-adventure game with themed levels, objectives, and enemies, and players can collect and play as many different characters from the franchise. As in the other Lego games, players solve puzzles, fight enemies, destroy environments to collect studs, build new objects out of piles of Lego they come across, and explore to collect characters and hidden objects. New in this game, players can collect and customize dinosaurs to then use in the hub world and to progress the story. A local co-op mode allows two people to play through the adventure together on a divided screen. Other recent games in the Lego series include Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham and Lego The Hobbit. There is also a Jurassic World expansion pack planned for upcoming toys-to-life game Lego Dimensions. Lego Jurassic World follows the stories of the four Jurassic Park films, including the new film Jurassic World, with five levels based on each film making 20 levels in total.
Players will be able to play as more than 100 characters from these films, including more than 20 dinosaurs. As with other Lego adaptations of existing franchises, Lego Jurassic World was developed by Traveller’s Tales. Lego Jurassic World is available for PC, PS4, Xbox One, Wii U, PS3, Xbox 360, Vita, and 3DS. With no online multiplayer, there’s no need to have a subscription to PlayStation Plus or Xbox Live. With 20 levels and a free-play mode, the game should keep players occupied for a long time. As with the other Lego games, when characters “die” they just collapse into a pile of Lego bricks and soon reappear. Any difficulty in the game will come from working out how to solve the puzzles. In the UK and Europe, PEGI rates Lego Jurassic World as only appropriate for those aged 7 and older for “non realistic looking violence towards fantasy characters – violence that is set in a cartoon, slapstick or child like setting that could be upsetting to very young children” and “pictures or sounds likely to be scary to young children”.
Some young players may find the dinosaurs scary, as in the films on which the game is based. Beyond this, it’s a story about learning to work with wild animals, not just de-clawing them. People play the Lego games for their humour and simple but enjoyable mechanics, particularly for the satisfying feeling of destroying objects in the game’s environments and collecting the Studs. Some players may skip Jurassic World as they wait for Lego Dimensions, but as with the other Lego games based on other franchises, fans of the Jurassic Park films will particularly enjoy this game.I’ll be honest: Lego Jurassic World is the first Lego game I’ve finished in quite a while now. Probably since 2012’s Lego Lord of the Rings. And that’s because in broad swathes all of these games are exactly the same—take a beloved series, convert the characters (and some of the scenery) into Lego bricks, then punch things apart and pick up about a million different collectibles. If it sounds like I’m down on the series, I’m really not.
Even the worst Lego game is about a billion times better than most of the licensed tripe I played as a kid—major exceptions made for Spider-Man 2, Cool Spot, and GoldenEye. But it’s a known quantity, and a repetitive one at that. One made primarily for kids, and maybe parents. You have to be really enamored with the source material to want to play a Lego game. The moral of Lego Jurassic World: Never underestimate my affinity for Lego-fied dinosaurs. Despite the title, Lego Jurassic World in fact covers all four of the Jurassic Park films. Yes, even the bad one. The most amazing thing about Lego Jurassic World is it manages to make a halfway decent game out of what’s really one fantastic film, two decent follow-ups, and the giant pile of bargain-basement celluloid known as Jurassic Park III. Never before has Traveller’s Tales had so damn little to work with. I mean, Lego The Hobbit comes pretty close, but at least you had the scope and spectacle of Tolkien’s larger Middle Earth saga to work with.
Jurassic Park III is just awful on every level. It’s probably the film I’ll look back on when I’m dying and go “I wish I hadn’t wasted that two hours of my life.” Lego Jurassic World even manages to turn Jurassic Park III into something if not amazing at least engaging—and really, that’s all we can ask. Anything more and we’d be talking about a legitimate earthly miracle, on par with turning water into wine. Key to the process? And some smaller Lego dinosaurs. I predicted this would be the highlight of Lego Jurassic World in my preview at GDC, and I was right. Each level in Lego Jurassic World contains a hidden “Piece of Amber.” Find this collectible and you then unlock the ability to spawn dinosaurs into the hub world in preordained paddocks or—in the case of certain smaller dinosaurs—even take them into the story levels as free-play characters. You can also embody Dr. Wu and customize the dinosaurs in question, changing their color schemes or creating new dinosaurs by (for example) swapping a triceratops head onto a velociraptor body.
And then you can make the dinosaurs fight. Truth be told, that’s really the standout feature/gimmick in Lego Jurassic World—but it’s a good one. The range of dinosaurs is pretty astounding too. You can play as the miniscule Compsognathus, which is about the size of a chicken. On the other hand you can play as an Brachiosaurus, which is literally so big that it breaks the game’s (pitiful) draw distance. Aside from that, it’s a pretty standard Lego game. The hub world this time is in fact four separate hub worlds, one for each game. Of the four, it’s clear that the most time went into designing Lego Jurassic World—probably not a huge surprise, given the title. It’s the only one that feels lively though, with the other three hubs feeling…well, like deserted jungle islands. The game is also remarkably short for a Lego game, considering it covers all four films. I clocked about twelve hours, and that included quite a significant amount of messing around in the hub.
Of course, we can attribute some of that to the fact that hardly anything happens in the second and third films. Especially the third film, where it seems like Traveller’s Tales really had to stretch to make a dismal plot into a semi-coherent game. That being said, I laughed a fair few times. Jeff Goldblum is especially hilarious, with Traveller’s Tales taking quite a few shots at the “unique” Dr. Malcolm. The infamous Jurassic Park laugh/giggle/purr even makes an appearance in the title screen, which is great. I also developed a soft spot for Mr. DNA, who steps in for the game’s tutorials and provides random dinosaur facts in the loading screens. It’s a great use of the source material. Less great: The dialogue is occasionally terrible—and I don’t just mean the writing itself. Lego Jurassic World continues the Lego trend of lifting lines directly from the films. It sounds just like Jurassic Park. Sometimes those lines are of iffy audio fidelity. I’ve noticed the same in Lego Lord of the Rings, Lego The Hobbit, and the like, but it’s doubly noticeable in Lego Jurassic World where every line is seemingly accompanied by leaves rustling and dinosaurs growling.
And even less great: Traveller’s Tales continues to pump out some of the most middling PC ports of the modern era. I’m starting to wonder how much of this I can ascribe to the developers and how much I should ascribe to WB, considering it’s the same flaw that afflicted Batman: Arkham Knight and Mortal Kombat X. The PC port quality is on par with Jurassic Park III. Actually, I take that back. Whatever the case, it’s frustrating. Aside from the dismal draw distance I mentioned above, we get goodies like “The game still doesn’t work properly with the default Windows 7 Aero themes so it freaks out and converts to Basic on launch,” and “The game’s menus don’t function with a mouse,” and “The default resolution/refresh rate is absurdly low.” The game runs, sure—and runs well after tweaking. But it points to a certain lax approach to PC porting that I’m not sure I’m comfortable with. And it's one I hope the devs fix soon. Lego Jurassic World is neither the most ambitious of the Lego games (that honor goes to Lord of the Rings) nor the most polished (Marvel Super Heroes).