So its no secret that the Lego games are a big deal in my house. Some of them have even been purchased multiple times so that mama can play them on her handhelds while also playing them cooperatively on the full sized consoles with Pea. We have played Lego games from the first Indiana Jones to the latest Lego movie game and really had a blast (with a few exceptions). Please keep in mind though that as the newer games come out the gameplay and mechanics is also evolving a bit as well.
The early games like Indiana Jones and the Star Wars games were really just bash up the Lego games with some film specific humor thrown in. And that was great. Most of the jokes went right over Pea’s head because she has never seen the Indiana Jones or Star Wars films. They are still a little too graphic for her. Don’t get me wrong, this kid loves violence, but it still needs to be very cartoonish for her and the fact that Legos can always just be put back together makes it all the more bearable. In the early Lego games the narrative was almost non-existent and relied on the player to know the story before they sit down to play the game. This actually starts to change with the Star Wars Trilogy and the second Indiana Jones games when we start to see the actual film narratives written into the games themselves. This is also when we start to see the games get better ratings because adults are enjoying them more.
As I am a bit of a run and gun gamer who sometimes enjoys destroying things just for the sake of destroying them I have loved these games for the very beginning. Don’t get me wrong, I do recognize that second generation of the Lego games are more complex, but I don’t know that I would necessarily argue that they are “better” more than just “different”. One of the mechanical elements that has held fast through all of the Lego games is the puzzle solving element that requires you to use different characters to open different doors, turn different switches, etc. and these choices usually made perfect sense. Hans Solo was not simply going to stroll into the bad guy stronghold and Harry Potter was not going to just waltz on into the Ravenclaw Common Room. Different people belonged to different communities and having that mechanism in place was a fun way to talk to Pea about sorting and categorization without pulling out colored blocks or animal figures.
Joyfully, the last year or so has seen the Lego games only get better and better. Lego Batman 2 was not only the best Lego game ever (in my opinion) but one of the best games that I played that year period. They just pegged the lore and it made me feel like a kid again. Lego Marvel Superheroes was almost as good, but just didn’t nail it in the way that Batman 2 did because, in my opinion, it was trying to align itself too much with the series of Avenger/Marvel films that have been flooding theaters as of late. And I won’t even mention the awful, buggy, unplayable mess that was Lego Lord of the Rings. And then we come to The Lego Movie Videogame. Lego Movie received so much hype because it was slated to release right before the new (and first) full length Lego theatrical film. Let me start by saying that the Lego Movie game is not bad. It’s just not good. At least not good for playing with younger kids.
I won’t even talk about the fact that the female protagonist is names “Wildstyle” or the fact that she should clearly be the special because she is the Masterbuilder extraordinaire who was clearly on track to find the mythical piece of the resistance before Joe Average Idiot (aka Emmett) literally fell on the damned thing by accident. We won’t talk about the fact that Wildstyle seemingly has to support Emmett’s idiocy as he tries to live up to the prophecy of being “The One” or how this doesn’t get resolved to my satisfaction in the end (I won’t spoil it). And I’ll just mention her relationship with Batman in passing and let your imaginations run wild.
But what I will talk about is the game mechanics. The choose the right person for the right job puzzles still exist, but the mechanics have changed (and seemingly hastily thrown together). Now instead of showing us the picture of the character that is needed to complete a task when you approach it in simply surrounds the object with colored rings (i.e. a platform is surrounded by red/pink rings because a female character needs to jump up to the next platform—in this game women can just jump higher). So now, not only is it harder to discern who needs to do what, but you have to remember what the ring colors represent or read the dialogue every time (not good for non- or beginning readers) and the specifications, as with women jump higher, are just plain old random.
So all in all, your kids will probably want to play the Lego Move Videogame because of it’s close tie-in with the film itself and you will probably let them, but just know that this will not be as smooth of an experience as some of the other Lego games have been. Also be aware of the fact that if you have a non- or beginning reader that you will definitely need to play this game alongside of them to explain some of the oddly color coded mechanics. Or…you can talk them into a Lego Movie brick set and buy them the Lego Batman 2 game instead!
