LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures

June 18,2008 - With the successful Lego Star Wars games, Traveller’s Tales has moved on to the next LucasArts license, the Indiana Jones films. Lego Indiana Jones attempts to capture the Indiana Jones magic in Lego form just in time for the release of the new movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, to help you get caught up on Indy’s previous adventures. Is Lego Indiana Jones another worthy adaptation of a popular movie franchise or should you stick to the movies for your classic Indy experience?

Lego Indiana Jones does a good of covering all three of the original movies and making them friendlier for kids or a family to play through, as a few key scenes that may not be entirely appropriate for younger kids are tweaked to be more much more appropriate for them to see. Unfortunately for those hoping for complete translation to the blocky world, Nazis don’t have the swastika, nor are they called Nazis, but they still have the rest of the look down. Each movie is cut into six chapters with about five to six hours of gameplay for each movie and you do have the option to play movies out of order, if you want to play Temple of Doom or Lost Crusade first. Like Lego Star Wars, Lego Indiana Jones doesn’t feature any dialogue in its cutscenes, so you do miss out on the Harrison Ford humor and the other classic lines in the films.

One of the big claims about Lego Indiana Jones is that each character has a unique ability and that’s not necessarily true. There are some characters, like Willie, Short Round, Indy, and others that have unique abilities, most of the rest generally carry special weapons or items that they aren’t required to be used. These weapons can almost be any object you can pick up the game, from guns to shovels, torches to swords, and even vehicles can be used to run over objects for their precious coins. Also included with some of these characters are their phobias, so Indy and a few other characters get squeamish around snakes spiders, or rats, making them impossible to use until you get rid of the snakes. With all of these characters, it’s a no-brainer that co-op play is involved, though just for two players and there’s no online co-op, which is a disappointment considering the last Lego Star Wars game included the feature for the Xbox 360 version. For Temple of Doom and Last Crusade, you will regularly see three characters on screen, so one character will stay controlled by the AI.

The gameplay of Lego Indiana Jones is very much the same as previous Lego Star Wars games, as you make your way through levels destroying objects for coins, solving puzzles, and killing enemies and bosses that appear. It still has that simple fun quality about it that makes the game easily accessible for players of all ages. Vehicles can be found in quite a few of the levels, such as motorcycles, bicycles, elephants, cars, trucks, and boats. In between chapters, you can head back to Barnett College, which acts as the game’s hub world. There you can visit the library to buy new characters, access the classroom to enter codes, visit the theater to view cutscenes, head to the mail room to collect parcels and secrets, go to the art room to create custom characters, or check out the artifact room to view any artifacts you’ve collected throughout the game.

Lego Indiana Jones has surprisingly good visuals, with the environments having a nice realistic look to them while all of the interactive objects look like the plastic Legos you know and love. Even the hub world has a ton of breakable objects for easy coin, so you’re hardly ever in need of more cash if you feel like taking the time to break everything you can find. Characters look the way they should and are nicely animated, especially for the various versions of certain characters. The classic Indy music returns along with some great musical cues for when enemies appear off-screen. The one strange sound effect comes from punching objects, which sounds more like a cannon shot than simple punches and may have been more fitting for a Lego Rocky game.

Lego Indiana Jones’s success comes from keeping the fun gameplay of the Lego Star Wars games, but injecting the classic Indy moments, music, and characters. This is the perfect way to introduce kids to the movies if you don’t feel the melting faces and the Temple of Doom are appropriate for them. For the somewhat budget price tags of the console versions, Lego Indy’s got a lot of gameplay and unlockables to make sure you get your money’s worth, especially if you have a friend with whom to play.

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