The first few minutes of LEGO Jurassic World has you and the characters wide mouthed and gaping at the marvels of science. The screaming and running starts pretty soon though. This is one of the best LEGO games to come out in years and it’s a ton of fun!
As the least combative Lego game to date, the four films recreated in block form — Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Jurassic Park 3 and Jurassic World — here swap regularly between the ooh of playing as plastic dinosaurs, and pegging it away from gigantic lizards as fast as blocky little legs can carry you.
Which is just as well, because when the fighting does start, it’s far from a highlight. It makes sense: the movies are mostly about humans trying to avoid dinosaurs. Admittedly, no one comes to this series for the combat. Instead, you’ll get to immerse yourself with minimal interruption into a classic slice of Lego puzzling. And the puzzles are fairly challenging. I started this game with a colleague, and the first remark we made five minutes into this game was, “No way kids can figure out these puzzles”.
Unless you’re new to LEGo games, you know the basics already: it’s a mix of figuring which of the characters/cast has the power that matches the obstacle at hand, along with pummeling all the Lego in the area into gloriously satisfying rains of clacking stud money, and occasionally building something. The difference here is that ‘cast’ isn’t just paleobotanists willing to rummage around in mounds of dino poo, or archaeologists who can use Lego bones to build special structures. It’s dinosaurs too.
They are the coolest addition to a Lego game in ages. Unlocked by finding the chunk of Lego amber in each level, each new addition to your roster of terrible lizards feels like a little treat. And it’s really compelling to scour every level looking for similar collectibles.
Sadly, the dinos are underused in the main story, since that sticks, more or less, to the original movies. The story brilliantly captures set-piece moments from the movies. Fending off raptors in Jurassic Park 3 as an Ankylosaurus is rare instance of truly enjoyable combat. The back-and-forth between the different movies also invokes a sense of nostalgia.
Outside of story mode is where you’ll get to see what Lego Jurassic World’s bestiary can really do, returning in Free Play to rinse these levels of collectibles and earn gold bricks.Several more shiny blocks await in the overworlds of Isla Nublar and Isla Sorna, plus bonus chase levels, where you mostly run into the camera, dodging attacks and following stud trails.
The better distractions are the enclosures, where you can use those bricks to build pads that summon the lizards too big to work in the main game. There are also workers to rescue, races to win, dinosaurs to heal and new characters to unlock.
Anything in the world that’s made out of LEGO bricks that isn’t one of the 100-plus playable characters can be broken into studs to be spent on bonuses or rebuilt within the environment to progress further in the world. Anyone who’s uttered a line in a Jurassic Park movie can be unlocked eventually, from Ian Malcolm and that annoying kid at the raptor dig site to the dino-wrangling, motorbike-riding Owen Grady and, awesomely, Mr. DNA himself.
Verdict: LEGO Jurassic World is an all-inclusive series package, and each of the four movies is broken up into five lightning-fast stages that run two to three segments each. Seeing the series’ iconic moments recreated with cute figurines is a treat, and each of the four campaigns is fast-paced enough that completing the entire franchise in its brick-based form will only take roughly seven to eight hours. And that’s eight hours of good fun!!
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