In LEGO: The Lego Movie: The Videogame, you play as Emmet Brickowski, an every day LEGO builder who is nothing more than an average guy, who falls into something incredible and mysterious. He is joined by Wyldestyle, Vitruvius, Batman, Uni-Kitty, and a slew of other LEGO inspired character in order to stop Lord Business from terrorizing the LEGO universe! The game follows the plot of the film, but spends a bit more time exploring specific worlds and solving puzzles. IF you haven't seen the film, don't worry. The game does a fine job of explaining everything to the gamer while they run through the story.
It's a lot like all the other LEGO games of the past, except a bit less sandbox than Undercover or Marvel Super-Heroes. The game takes you through a variety of LEGO lands like the Old West, the City, and up into the clouds where you get to enjoy what seems to be a rave with Uni-Kitty, who is one of the weirdest characters to play as and a bit of a trip. It's your goal to stop Lord Business and stop him from freezing the world in place with Kragle.
Think of this game as a grand tour of what the LEGO universe has to offer. Well, more of a tour of anything that isn't licensed, minus a few DC characters. It's a ton of fun visiting all these areas and seeing what types of challenges they offer the player. What sets this game a bit more apart from other LEGO games is that it's more than just DC characters or Lord of the Rings characters. It's everything LEGO smashed into one giant game, and while all these different themes and character types would normally make a game feel disjointed and chaotic, the overlying story of connecting all these places in this universe makes everything fit together perfectly.
We got to try this game out on the Wii U and the one question we had during this run is how The Lego Videogame utilizes the Wii gamepad. With previous LEGO games, like LEGO City Undercover, and Marvel Super Heroes, you can change your characters through the gamepad or play the game directly on it. Sadly, that's all you can do, which is the big difference between the other LEGO games which offer a few more features for Wii U players.
The gameplay is exactly what you expect from a LEGO game: smash everything to collect studs, utilize certain characters and their abilities to solve puzzles, and eventually go back to the same levels to accomplish new tasks with new characters. The replay value of this game is extremely high, as it is with every single LEGO game. And like other LEGO games, it has a great sense of humor and adds a only one new element that was pretty awesome: construction building. Throughout the levels, Emmett has to collect instruction pages, in order to build an object. After he collects the pages, he walks over to a construction site and builds the object in a timely manner. Whilst doing this, the player has to guess the correct piece shown on the screen. The faster the player does this, the more studs they collect.
What about the comic book/nerd side of things? Well, here's some very familiar characters that you may know that appear in this game: Batman, Wonder Woman, Superman, Green Lantern, Gandalf. We got a chance to play a few levels featuring Batman and he was pretty awesome. This isn't the Batman from previous LEGO Batman games though. He's not all decked out with every piece of gear imaginable. He has his grappling hook and batarangs, and that's it. However, he is hilarious. There's nothing funnier than hearing how much Batman hates rainbows, which, during one level, he states numerous times. So while the video game/comic book connection is a tad thin, it's still worth it to be able to control these characters.
This Lego game isn't without its faults. I suffers from a few of the same problems as its predecessors, mainly problems with your cohorts along your travels. It doesn't matter who you team up with. They are worthless in battle, unless you switch to them and do all the dirty work yourself. You basically have to see your partners as distractions and cannon fodder rather than someone who is actually going to help you out. Sure, they fight back, but they never actually destroy any baddies, which is a bummer, especially when Emmet is trying to do something important, and Batman just stands there, taking robot punches for the team, until he dies, in which all the robot cops come after you. It's a bit frustrating, but there's only one small problem aside from that.
If you haven't seen the film, this game is going to spoil the film for you because it follows the film. So, this is really geared more towards folks who have already seen the film, so if you don't mind spoilers, then this won't bug you.
Also, this, like every single other LEGO game, gets incredibly repetitive. Levels, later on, become tasks rather than fun: drill here, switch character, jump up, switch characters, throw staff, switch characters, jump twice and kick down ladder, switch character, climb ladder and fix electrical box, repeat in new scene. It's what you expect from a LEGO game, but this game is a bit more repetitive than normal.
Maybe it's because I have a soul birthed from eternal depths of a deep-cut Edgar Allen Poe story mixed with the first Type O Negative album, but I really don't like the song "Everything is Awesome," which is played in the opening and a piece of it is played every time you collect 100% of the studs in every level.
LEGO: The Lego Movie Videogame is a ton of fun, even though you start to feel deja vu with the tasks later on. Somehow, this franchise of games stays fun after years and years of the same thing, over and over. You'll get a kick out of the cut scenes and the one-liners since it's incredibly funny, and it's a game you'll really want to play each level over again, so you can collect everything. While we didn't get to play the whole game, I can tell you that the first impression was pretty good, not awesome, but good. If you're a LEGO game fan, pick this one up, but make sure you realize this is nothing really new.
Mat "Inferiorego" Elfring is a tweeter, podcaster, and is probably a goth kid on the weekends because he hates the song "Everything is Awesome."
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