Lego Indiana Jones

Review from Matt - Thursday, 19 June 2008 @ 8:00am

Lego Star Wars was something of a revelation to me. I played it a little bit when it was new and was available on a range of demo machines where you could enjoy playing with some loser who had no idea what he was doing and kept going the wrong way. I don't care that you're six. Fuck off.

But until you've really sat down with someone and played through Lego Star Wars you haven't played it at all, and until recently I hadn't had that chance.

I hired Lego Star Wars to play with my son. I really didn't expect it to be such a good experience, and that we could actually play through it together so effectively. It's extremely rare to find a game that can be enjoyably co-op played with one person aged 8 years old, and the other 31.

Because of this I was really looking forward to Lego Indiana Jones. I even pre-ordered it, which is unheard of for me. It's worth pointing out that neither GTA IV nor Metal Gear Solid 4 were pre-ordered, so that says something.

This isn't a review of Lego Star Wars. It's a review of Lego Indiana Jones. How does the new title compare to its predecessor?

Actually, I should backtrack a little bit. I've kind of started off with the assumption that everyone knows what Lego Indiana Jones is and what Lego Star Wars is, and how it works, and all that. And given our readership it's probably a reasonably safe bet. But in the interests of doing a good job of reviewing it I should probably explain.



The Lego Movie series are essentially Lego licensed movie related videogames. Unlike your standard movie tie-ins, though, the Lego games are based on long established but still prominent titles. Lego Star Wars was the first one, and was a smash hit, and Lego Indiana Jones the second. There's a Lego Batman coming soon. Lego Batman doesn't take from the existing movie series (which series would you pick anyway?) but instead is built around the general universe, featuring baddies who haven't made it to big time movie fame yet. I don't think I'd be out of place to speculate Spiderman being ripe for the Lego treatment one day, but maybe his moving mechanic is too difficult to Legotize. I have an awesome image in my head of Lego Schindler's List, or possibly Lego The English Patient. Lego Saving Private Ryan, with armless little lego men bouncing round... ahhh, so good. Anyway, moving on...

It's hard to define exactly why the Lego X format works so well. I think a big part of it is that the characters and situations are so familiar to us that the Lego versions become almost a parody of the originals, but a kind of fun and loving parody. Then, of course, there's the fact that Lego is awesome. There's probably no better toy in existence, and we all have very good memories of Lego filled childhoods.

Lego Indiana Jones (like LSW) has two basic modes. Story Mode and Free Play. Story Mode has to be played first. You play as pre-defined characters, generally Indy and an offsider such as Salah or Short Round or whoever would be in that part of the movie, and have to co-operate to get through the level. Finishing the level (or sometimes just at places in the middle) shows cutscenes. The cutscenes are essentially bits of the movie filmed in Lego, and are often quite funny and a bit cheesy. Completing a level in story mode is usually pretty pedestrian. By which I mean you spend a lot of time walking. See below. Anyway, once completed in Story Mode the game opens up the level to be played in Free Play. Free Play is where the action really is. You can choose the characters you want to be, then the computer assigns you some others to fill out a team of 7. I'm really not sure how it assigns them, but it's generally pretty good at determining what you're going to need, though if you need something really specific you might be better off picking them to start with.

As you go through the game you unlock more characters, and some others can be bought at the college that serves as a kind of hub. Some of these characters are just filler, one more thing to collect, but a few have specific abilities that make them invaluable. Getting access to those abilities opens up new areas, or just makes getting through the normal areas much easier.

A good example is the Enemy Officer. He's a Nazi Officer, but I suspect the N word might be just a bit too grown up for a PG title, for some reason. Or possibly they just wanted to be able to sell the game in Germany. Anyway, the officer can throw grenades. He normally uses them to break your character into constituent pieces. You can't really avoid his blasts and you have to get in close for a kill, so they're an annoying adversary. But when he's on your side he's a real help. The grenades of the officer blow up doors and other items, allowing you to access new areas. Similarly characters who wear the right hat (Nazi or Thuggee generally) can access statues or gates that let you through or unlock a chest.

The chests are a pretty big deal. Each level has 10 chests, each of which contains a few lego pieces that form together to create a little statue. Some of the chests are in fiendish places, and require a full roster of different character abilities to access. Others I have no effing clue how to get.

This requirement to get the right characters and re-visit levels for completion sounds dull, but it's actually very satisfying. Only about 2 or 3 chests are gettable on the story run through, and Free Playing it really is where the action lives.

So let's revisit the earlier question. How does Lego Indiana Jones compare to Lego Star Wars?

Lego Indiana Jones is a great game, but it is weaker than Lego Star Wars for a number of reasons. One is this regrettable but simple reason: Indiana Jones is not as cool as Star Wars. While the Indiana Jones movies stand on their own right as exceptional movies to this day, they dont have the kind of retro-kitsch nostalgia value that Star Wars does, and which made it so tremendously suited to the Lego treatment.



Combat is not as good as Lego Star Wars either. Combat for most characters, from Indy to Marion to Short Round is identical, with nothing but a basic punch. Indy can also use his whip, but it's actually not that effective. The only characters with a real advantage in combat are those who start with a weapon, especially the thuggees with their swords, or the german soldier who carries grenades. Almost all combat is melee. Enemy soldiers drop guns quite often, but they vanish surprisingly soon and you only get a few (too few) shots out of them, so you're back to fisticuffs. This is a noticable contrast to Lego Star Wars, where characters had either a blaster for range or a lightsabre for awesome but in either case the merry mashing of the attack button was a good way of also dodging incoming fire, making the combat more dynamic, exciting, and fun. To be honest in Indy it can be kind of a chore. Especially when waves of baddies keep coming and take so long to dispatch it's hard to keep moving.

Yet another flaw is that while playing Qi Gon Gin or Obi Wan or Luke or Vader or Solo or Chewbacca is equally fulfilling, Lego Indy doesn't have nearly the same balance of loved characters. Frankly you're either Indiana Jones or you're nobody. This is made even more apparent considering Indy gets to whip himself across chasms and open doors and stuff, while the other character just sits patiently doing a Sudoku puzzle while waiting for Indy to build him a wheelchair ramp. Indy has a whip that's needed to get through the game. Indy's off leaping chasms. Who the hell am I? Oh... Marcus Brody. Watch me translate these heiroglyphics – yeah, bitches, that's how I roll.

There's one final reason that Lego Star Wars, specifically the Complete Saga, is a superior game to Lego Indiana Jones, and that's obviously game length. Indy contains 3 movies, Star Wars contains 6. That's twice as much Lego, for the same (or a lesser!) price. The value for money in Lego Star Wars is fantastic, and hard to beat.

That being said, Lego Indy is by no means bad. While it comes up slightly short of the gaming high water mark set by the awesome Lego Star Wars it still stands head and shoulders over all but a few recent releases, like GTA IV. Lego Indy is the sort of game that will fill a weekend with fun, and then a few more days as well for those people who are a bit more fussy about completing every thing.

Lego Indy like Star Wars before it stands out better as a multiplayer co-op game than it does as a single player experience, and it's good to be able to share the fun. It's a pity, then, that this is one of the areas that contains the most bugs. There are a number of places (it will happen about once every half an hour) where you can fall and die, only to respawn on the point of death, falling and dying over and over. It take precise timing to respawn, jump out of the way and continue on, and it gets somewhat frustrating. Other places the characters if they get far apart can constantly “tug-of-war” each other to death, pulling each other into pits. This can mean that one person survives a series of deadly jumps, but the other doesn't, meaning the failure respawning will pull the one who succeeded back and to death. Again, frustrating.

Speaking of frustrating, the other thing that can get annoying is the process of trying to figure out where the hell to jump. It's not that you don't know where to go, it's that the textures, camera angles, etc, conspire against you to make it very hard to figure out where the platform sits in relation to yourself. Damn you, third dimension! We didn't have this problem in 2d side scrolling platformers.

There's one aspect of Lego Indy that's vastly improved over the previous game, though, and that's “getting stuck”. All too often in Star Wars you'd be travelling along and suddenly find you simply couldn't do anything or go anywhere. It took a trip to GameFAQs to figure out what you needed to do and that was usually a way back, where you didn't realise a tiny part of the background was important, and it required a completely new gameplay mechanic that had not yet been introduced. Silly of me to miss that.

Lego Indiana Jones doesn't do that. You never get stuck like that. Though there are challenging sections they rarely get so challenging as to be frustrating, and bits that are usually are for getting the hidden chests rather than to complete the story.



There's a downside to that, though. Rarely is something new introduced. There are vehicle sections, generally after a long process of building and fixing said vehicle. But they're startlingly brief, often to the point of literally building the thing, smashing it through a gate, and then the level is finished. There are places where you get a vehicle, but there's simply no advantage to having it, and opportunities to really use the vehicles seem to have been passed up. There's one section with a long bit ideal for a fun motorbike run (the escape from the castle in Last Crusade). This could and should have been much like the speeder bike section in Return of the Lego Jedi. But it's not. It's just not at all. Instead of a fun and furious romp through the forest it's a stop/start affair with remarkably little actual riding, approximately zero speed, and bikes that can take a single hit before you get knocked off. You can't shoot from the bike, even if you had a gun, and you can't run people over with them. So you have to get off, kill the bad men, then get back on again, only to have the same fuckers you just killed respawn 5 seconds later. Rinse and repeat, edging your way towards the end.

Despite my criticisms I want to stress the most important fact. Lego Indiana Jones is awesome.
Oddly enough I actually think it's a particularly good looking game on the PS3 (or 360). Even though it doesn't have the gritty detail of something like GTAIV the big chunky items and bright colours are solid and well realised. I suppose if there's anything a computer should be able to render accurately it's solid blocks of flat coloured plastic. But it really does work very well, creating an awesome world, created in Lego blocks, often very imaginatively.

If you're playing multiplayer you wouldn't really notice, but if you're playing single player you'll find that the AI for the second dude is actually pretty good. He follows you quite effectively, switching characters where need be (in freeplay) and generally takes your cues quite well. He's adequate in combat and will handle the second switch, etc, quickly and effectively. Admittedly every now and then his Downs Syndrome kicks in and he spazzes off somewhere when you're trying to open the door, but nevermind.

Lego Indiana Jones is a lot of fun. There are very few valid excuses for not buying it. One is that you don't think it sounds like fun. If this is you, then you clearly haven't played Lego Star Wars, and you have permission to buy that instead of Lego Indy. The other is that you simply don't have the money. Well, in that case, all I can do is helpfully point at you and laugh. Ha ha ha, look at the poor person.

Summary

If you're after a deep game with a thriling storyline this isn't your game. The story is an afterthought because it's so well known. If you're after a good bit of fun, and especially if you've got kids of any age who could play together or with you, then this title is a given. That being said, you don't need a kid. Having a friend would do. Thankfully I have a child.

Pros

A lot of fun, a rare example of multiplayer co-op. It's Lego. It's Indiana Jones. Join the dots. Good value for completionists.

Cons

Not quite as good as the forerunner, slightly dodgy combat. Can be occasionally frustrating.