games: Lego Indiana Jones

So undoubtedly you’ve seen the latest Indiana Jones movie, and spent many hours in your back garden with a paintbrush and a bullwhip playing archeologist, but if that isn’t enough for you, you can now enjoy retracing our hero’s steps in LEGO video game form.

LEGO Star Wars was an incredibly popular family title and LEGO Indiana Jones, which I’m playing here on 360, seems set to meet with similar success. The classic films Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom, and Last Crusade are all played out in a 3d platform game with drop-in multiplayer, largely comprising puzzle solving and teamwork, collection, and mild combat. There’s a difficulty level suitable for children, but not so mind bogglingly simple that adults will be bored.

Once completed, levels can then be replayed in free play mode using the full range of characters you have unlocked. As the characters have different skills and tools, this will allow you to access areas that were off limits in story mode, and so complete your collection tasks.

You can dip in and out of the three movies by visiting Barnett college, where you can also view and buy artefacts, more characters and so on.

The artwork is good and the world looks lush and cute with its interactive LEGO additions to the scenery. The characters are nicely animated and the non-verbal cut scenes have a lot of charm. The use of LEGO for movie based video games was an ingenious solution to the normal feeling of a watered down obligatory movie tie-in, and definitely gives its games titles a stand alone quality, and of course much greater merchandizing potential!

There’s also a lot of humour to the game for example Willie’s special skill of shattering glass with her scream, or the tongue in cheek combat animation. There are also fun Star Wars references, and even unlockable Star Wars characters. Although fans of LEGO Star Wars game may well have preferred some of the features of the complete saga to have carried over rather than in-jokes that simply remind them of a more expansive version of the LEGO games franchize!

For the most part, the adaptation works well. The platforming style really suits Indiana Jones, and while it’s probably not the best archeological practice, trashing everything is somewhat in keeping with our somewhat dysphraxic hero’s style. Although, the collection element does run counter to the morality expressed in every single Indiana Jones movie, where greed is man’s undoing.

Technically speaking, it’s pretty good, although there are times when AI characters will get stuck, and clipping is not infrequent. Some of the game mechanics are a bit of a pain, and I frequently swapped characters when I was trying to get into a vehicle as both functions are mapped to the same context dependent button. There are also some strange set-up features. Auto v-sync defaults to off resulting in quite horrendous tearing until you change the option. And while it’s useful to have an adaptive difficulty option available, especially if you have younger kids playing, then the fact that it defaults to on means that a lot of people won’t know to turn it off until the trickier sequences at the end of a level and so have to either restart the whole level or not successfully complete the sequence, which definitely takes away from the gaming aspect of a video game.

Now I have to confess I wasn’t a huge fan of LEGO Star Wars. I mean, I love LEGO and I love Star Wars, and I’ve even bought my fair share of Star Wars LEGO, but the game just left me a little cold. It was one of those ones where I could see its considerable accomplishments, but sadly couldn’t get into it. And LEGO Indy is giving me the same feeling - it’s fun, but I don’t want to play it for more than half an hour at a time. I find it frustrating when games require you to play through areas more than once to complete them, particularly when this additional play is not motivated by any sort of story. If I had children or OCD I’d be thrilled with this title, but the idea of completion for completion’s sake doesn’t really do it for me. Objectively speaking, this gets 4 stars and a lot of people will really love it, but when I need my zany, child-friendly, 3d platforming and collection fix, I’ll be playing Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction instead.

For the best of the rest:

IGN:
Traveller’s Tales is back and tackling the plastic building block world again. After exhausting the Star Wars franchise with no less than three LEGO Star Wars releases, the company has worked with LucasArts on bringing another of its franchises to the peg-filled universe with LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures.

Gamespot:
Now that Traveller’s Tales has conquered a galaxy far, far away, it has set its sights on giving a Lego makeover to a more terrestrial franchise. Lego Indiana Jones: The Complete Trilogy lets you reenact the key scenes from the first three Indiana Jones movies, with a blocky twist only Lego can provide. The idea of children’s building toys pasted atop action-packed adventures may seem strange–and seeing a Lego monkey is rather unnerving–but the enduring charm of the movies is the perfect foundation for some small-scale tomb robbing. The surprise is, even without a nostalgic-powered handcuff fastening you to these stories, the seamless co-op and clever puzzles should be enough to draw even the Indy ignorant into the experience.

Euro Gamer:
Back when the first LEGO Star Wars game came out, it felt like a breath of fresh air. It was unpretentious, unapologetically silly and packed with the sort of well-rounded platforming gameplay that, Mario aside, seems to have died out in the current generation of consoles. The sequel followed, applying the same approach to the classic Star Wars movies, and then The Complete Trilogy smushed both games together with a generous side order of new bonus content.