[All week long SideQuesting celebrating LEGO, one of the greatest toys of the last 100 years and a true bastion of creativity. Every day we’ll have original content submitted to us by great writers. Look, here’s one now!]
I’m in a lull – we all go through it in gaming. Dragon Age‘s platinum trophy is far behind me, Dying Light has been extinguished and the Handsome Collection’s Borderlands 2 is, for the most part, complete (the Pre-Sequel, not-so-much). As I often do when a lull hits I start counting the days to the various releases I’m looking forward too throughout the year.
Traveller’s Tales’ LEGO Jurassic World is among my most anticipated game launches coming up. To a lot of people this would seem like a dirty confession; a fully grown and mostly-mature man playing LEGO games is something that should be spoken of in hushed tones and only ever given away through achievement lists.
Pish! They may, on first glance, appear to be child’s play – A toy for the under 10s – but that couldn’t be further from the truth/my own personal opinions. Although it’s an understandable first impression: the bright colours, the basic combat, the initially short levels and the simple cartoonish characters – these things are a façade that hide a much deeper, more universally appealing game. Each game in the series begs to be played through twice, in fact they have to be for you to even come close to experiencing the whole thing. Every level has both a Story mode, generally beginning and ending with a humorous and cutesy cutscene giving the story in its muted fashion with oodles of fan-service, and then, once the Story Mode is complete, Freeplay becomes available. In Freeplay you can freely switch between all of your unlocked characters, gaining access to each of their specific talents and skills, unlocking the rest of level. It isn’t rare for the level being played in Story mode to be merely half of what’s available to you in Freeplay.
Boiling a LEGO game down, removing all of the glossy blocks and the wry LEGO smiles, ignoring all of the fan service from each franchise, and looking purely at the gameplay, the LEGO games are comparable to many triple-A titles. Obviously they don’t feature the precision shooting of Call of Duty, or the deep character development of Skyrim, but the number of tools you have at your disposal by the time you’ve completed Story Mode – very much the start of the game – is admirable, especially for a “child’s game”.
This is an impressive accomplishment given that all of the LEGO games follow the same basic formula, but each addition to the LEGO series brings not only enough new mechanics to keep the game fresh and enjoyable, but also a wealth of new characters and locations from the given franchise for you to fall in love with all over again. If you’re a Harry Potter fan, then there was no greater joy than getting to control the LEGO avatar of Harry through a freshly realised Hogwarts, full to the brim of secrets and collectables (Oh! The collectables!) and bustling with head nods towards the lore of the franchise. So much of the appeal with the first LEGO Star Wars game was not so much in reliving the stories that I loved as a child, but in the retelling of the stories. The injection of classic, silent-slapstick comedy into scenes that, in their original form, I know off by heart. When played out by brightly coloured, geometric characters there is so much charm and childish whimsy added, even to stories that could be considered “adult” before their LEGOfication.
One of my favourite little touches from the LEGO games series – and they are all full of wonderful, tiny, details – is the camp, drunken swagger that Traveller’s Tales added to Captain Jack Sparrow in LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean as you’re moving him around the levels. Such a tiny, seemingly insignificant detail, but it’s one that shows just how much the development teams know and understand the franchises that they’re working on. It’s easy to imagine a Clockwork Orange style induction to a franchise whenever it’s discovered that anyone working on the next new game has never fully ingested the source material! “So, Mr Artist, you say don’t know what a Spinosaurus is? Come. Take a seat…”
Much has been learned since the original Star Wars trilogy was released in LEGO form; the Hub worlds have expanded from small set pieces with a few few side rooms, through larger buildings with twisting corridors and hidden secrets, all the way to vast open world areas like New York City and the sprawl of Middle Earth. Also, character skills are much more liberally distributed among your characters these days, rather than all female characters having a larger leap and all evil characters being able to manipulate dark blocks, skills are given out on a more personal basis. Often with certain key skills only being available to a single character – generally someone you can’t unlock for Freeplay until you’ve completed the story.
And lets not forget that these are all licensed games. Not only licensed games but *good* licensed games. That’s a very rare concept in video gaming. Batman may have managed it a couple of times, and there are a number of Star Wars titles that aren’t awful, but on a whole, games licensed from established franchises are terrible cash-ins rushed out to meet a deadline. Even with Batman and Star Wars, given the choice, I would much rather play their LEGO counterparts again.
So, as I return from a trip to my local Game store having preordered my copy of LEGO Jurassic World with no shame, I feel I can stand tall and proud when I declare my love for the series. Though I know that there will be red blocks with special powers to find (and I can already guess at what most of the powers will do), and I’m well aware that I will need to become a True Dino-Hunter on each level by collecting insane amounts of LEGO studs, and yes, I understand that there will be mini kits for me to collect the pieces to and I know the kinds of things I will have to do on each level to find them, I look forward to doing all of this with a childish glee and nostalgia in my heart.
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