Review: The LEGO Movie 2 Videogame

There are a few certainties in life, the sun goes up and down, dogs are always cute, you always have annoyingly loud eating people at the cinema and every year a couple LEGO games release for consoles. This time however developer TT Games ate some different cereals because they avoid the usual LEGO-game concepts and try something completely fresh. Let us take a look if “everything is still awesome ?” or if this fresh new wind carries some rotten smells with it. (which would require a new theme song too)

• Super creative: While the keep smashing the attack button is hard to call creative it is the surrounding extra gameplay elements that make The LEGO movie 2 Video game such an original game. Building your character with LEGO-parts, building an entire world from scratch, making an object to continue your progress, and so much more make this one of the best LEGO-games to play when it comes to gameplay.
• Charming visuals: It is a big shame that the game is plagued by some serious pop-up because the colorful world looks pretty fantastic and highly detailed. The qwerky looking characters from all kinds of franchises, for example, Batman looks better than before. It is ambiguous, something you truly witness in the Syspocalypstar world (I did not come up with this name, sorry) Here you can freely build your own world, guided with sub-quests. It takes a while before you get enough resources but it’s insanely fun to see this place come to life.
• Catchy sound: I consider it one of the best theme songs of all time, “Everything is awesome…” if you never heard it before I wouldn’t Youtube it because it drills itself in your brain and never comes out of it again. (it is even worse than look at my horse ?, my horse is amazing)
• Boss battles: Does this game have cool boss fights!! Original platforming pieces too, without a doubt the most fun and impressive parts of the game. It follows the same pattern but the polish and unusual mechanics make it such a wonderful experience, that leaves you with your mouth open.

• Weird story tie-in: or the fact that you hardly find any story at all. The narrative is done by the lady in the below screenshot Wyldstyle. (voiced by the cute movie voice Elizabeth Banks) World progress is loosely tied to the movie but most of the parts are ignored or simply told in shorter than a minute, kinda disappointing but it allows to be back on the gameplay fairly fast too.

• Camera demonically possessed by a LEGO-hater: I have no doubt about it, a demon ? presence has nested itself in the camera coding, especially when you play co-op. Luckily you don’t have to feed the damn thing with negative thoughts because oh boy… would you be depressed! More than often the camera uncontrollably sways left to right and will get stuck behind objects or the environment.
• Too much visual pop-up: Some levels are big enough so a brachiosaurus could play hide and seek in it, I understand that this is a massive hard thing to realize but other games have proven, for example, Crackdown 3 or Anthem that this can be done with a limited visual pop-up. Sadly this isn’t the case with this game, sometimes objects pop-up that are only a few meters away, this really destroys a lot of the atmosphere. You notice it even more because a lot of the objects have bright colors.
• Heartless and repetitive quests: I don’t mind fetch quests but this game is really pushing the envelope. Having to kill three easy monsters three times in a row isn’t my idea of interesting quests if only real life work was that easy. The levels have quite a few sub-quests but never did I have a meaningful one, all of them seem to be added purely as quick fill content.
• How bloody steps does one need to do for unlocking something??! True story! Unlocking characters or items you first need to find treasure chests in the worlds, when you open them you get a box with whatever you will unlock, this box can only be opened at a specific shop when you finally arrived at the shop you need to go through the cluttered menu. Congrats! You finally unlocked a character, a random character too by the way! So be prepared to do this many, many times. I’m pretty confident that this process could have been made a lot easier TT Games… seriously!

CONCLUSION

Developer: TT Games   Publisher: Warner Bros
Played on: Xbox One X Also available on: PS4 – Switch and PC
Dae Jim spend 10 hours busting stuff up for LEGO bricks before writing this review.
Achievement difficulty for 1000 Gamerscore: Searching for every collectible takes some time, 25 hours.
Perfect for: Co-op players, gamers that like to press X a million times, for those that like easy games.
Xbox Game Store link:Click here