| Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures
For years, Lego has been making toys of films, and also a few games based on itself, few of which were any good. Putting two and two together, they recently came up with Lego Star Wars (LSW, an astonishingly fantastic fun means of enjoying your favourite characters and situations in a whole new way). Now, they’re doing the same for other franchises, with Lego Batman coming out this Summer and, before then, Lego Indiana Jones. The question is, can it live up to the rather high marker of it’s predecessor? Note that this review is for the DS version, but it is available on all formats.
The short answer is that it depends on whether you liked LSW and if you like Indiana Jones. If the answer is yes to both, you’ll definitely like this, if only one you might or might not, and you definitely won’t if you answered no to both. Make no mistake, this is a game which knows very well what its audience is and isn’t interested in changing that.
It’s also a game which knows what it’s formula is, and it definitely doesn’t want to change that. That’s right, this game plays almost identically to LSW, with the changes that aren’t simply a case of swapping one universe for another virtually unnoticeable. Whether that delights or annoys you is down to personal preference. There are a couple of things - you no longer need to use the Force on absolutely everything to get studs, which was always uber-tedious, and on the DS you can now use the microphone and touch screen more often, but little else has changed.
For the uninitiated, Lego Indiana Jones is an extremely tongue in cheek, child friendly but not childish run through of the original three films. Using a variety of characters, from Herman to Satipo to Short Stop to Jones Senior, you work your way through a series of levels - six for each film - chronicling the events, with some parts obviously padded out to fit the medium. Along the way, you need to fight a wide variety of enemies, solve puzzles using character abilities, and collect “studs” - the currency of the Lego world. These studs are used to unlock extra characters, cheats, and, in the DS version, mini-games playable by the touch screen.
You’ll need to use a variety of different abilities to get through each level. So, you’ll need Indy’s whip, Satipo’s shovel, Jones Senior’s umbrella, Short Stop’s small size, etc. There’s two ways to play each level. The first is the story mode, in which you get characters as they appeared in the film with abilities sufficient to get you to the end, though you won’t be able to access most of each level this way - and virtually none at all in some. To get everything, you’ll need to go again in free play mode, in which you can select any unlocked character and are then given 7 other random characters that you’ve unlocked that gives you the full set of abilities (provided you’ve bought one of each of course).
What is there to unlock? Quite a bit, none of which is different from LSW. Each level has 10 Artefacts to collect, and when you get them all you can see something relevant to that stage of the film in your home base (Barnett College). One of these must be found by getting three treasure maps hidden in destroyable objects, the others are usually in harder to find places than that or require the solving of a puzzle. There’s also a Red Brick in each level, which allows the unlocking of a mini-game or cheat in the DS version. Notably, these are much much easier to find than in LSW for some reason. There’s also 108 gold bricks to get, with these being scored for getting things like all the artefacts, the red brick, and a certain amount of studs in story mode and free play (granting True Adventurer, to replace True Jedi from LSW). All this, plus all the characters, will take quite a while.
It’s important to realise that this is not a serious or challenging game. I won’t spoil things by saying what characters can be unlocked, but not all are from the Indiana Jones series... The issue of challenge may be a bit off putting. You still get infinite lives - when you die you just restart exactly where you were but minus a few studs, most of which you can usually recollect anyway (unless you fell off a cliff for example). There is some challenge in picking up everything, but in general it’s a very easy game that shouldn’t challenge most people.
As I’ve said before, whether you like it or not depends on your love (or lack thereof) of Lego games and Indiana Jones. I loved LSW and am a fan of Indy, but to nowhere near the extent of Star Wars, so I found this marginally less fun to play. If you’re the opposite however you’ll be different. Regardless, it’s still a very fun and funny platformer that should certainly provide at least a few hours worth of entertainment.
Lego Indiana Jones is out now on all formats. |
