[Update: Now with thoughts]
Only a fool wouldn’t be excited to get a turn with a new Lego game from Traveller’s Tales, so please be outstanding for the arrival of Lego Indiana Jones’ demo.
It’s a chunky 32 and a half Peggles, and you can read thoughts below.
It’s certainly… familiar.
Hopefully this is just with the demo, but I couldn’t get it to recognise anything other than the keyboard for controls, which was a bit awkward. Especially as the game’s camera has no intention of helping you out with depth perception when having to move through the z-axis.
Anyhow, it’s as charming and as silly as you’d expect from the series. Everything explodes into Lego chunks when hit as you might expect. As you’d expect, you can switch between the two characters to complete puzzles. As expected, you can build items out of piles of Lego…. Exactly. It’s all so very similar to Lego Star Wars that the word “expect” starts to sound weird from saying it so often.
Of course, it’s foolish to dismiss something for being as good as something else that’s really good. If you see what I mean. However, beyond an additional whip the demo offers nothing groundbreaking. It does, however, offer the scene running away from the big scary ball, which is important.
The cutscenes are completely gorgeous, the animation perfect, and the silliness ideal. It bodes well for LIJ spoofing the films as with the first Lego Star Wars, rather than attempting to eulogise them as with the second Lego Star Wars.
But, look, this is the most important thing: As soon as I completed the demo, I started playing it over again in the Free Play mode, with other available characters. Despite the familiarity, it still makes me want to play it.
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There’s a good chance of this being better than the film judging by the rumours.
Poking yourself in the eye repeatedly with a sharp stick will be better than that film.
Rook has seen the film.
Does it include the 4th film?
Wait. What’s wrong with the film? Have I missed something?
LEGO Games are always seminals. At least, the last three or four. And LEGO Island. Man, I loved that shit as a kid.
LEGO Island was a great game, while I beat all the minigames it was ages until I discovered you could break the Brickster out of jail and get the real game.
oh and downloading….
Can something be “always seminal”?
yeah test
I’m afraid so Mr. Walker. (Well I was referring to the movie-based LEGO Games (and LEGO itself), which will always be seminal classics in my mind- even if there is only two of them proper)
Wait a minute.
“Does it include the 4th film?”
Nope. It’s “The Original Adventures.”
I was more interested in the article asking me to “please be outstanding”…
Surely you meant ‘upstanding’ :)
Heheh, I noticed that too Optimaximal. Maybe it just means “be good for the demo”, kids. That sentence does have kinda broken grammars.
Is there any news on the actual official game of the 4th movie? It was suggested ages ago that it was meant to be released with the movie, but the game isn’t set to pop out for almost a year. With it’s use of Euphoria, it sounds damn promising too.
>Wait. What’s wrong with the film? Have I missed something
The trailer?
What was so bad about the trailer? I mean, ok, no Nazis, but apart from that?
When I heard that the 4th Indy will play in South America, I was hoping for a geriatric Indy to hunt geriatric Nazis in some Brazilian home for the elderly.
Yeah I watched the trailer and I really didn’t notice anything particularly awful about it. If it is about the Nazi’s; they can only be around in the 20th century for so long, you know.
Watched Raiders last night so definitely in the mood for this.
Don’t care for it at all.
Zzzzzzzzz………….
“Can something be “always seminal”?”
Semen?
Sorry.
Screw this, I’ve got a bus driving sim to play.
I just hope it doesnt have puzzles that a two year old can complete, which are just tedious and added to make it last longer.
@calabi
It probably will if it’s pitched the same as LEGO Star Wars, in other words at kids, with a parent joining in the co-op and laughing at the little references the kids won’t get. These are not games for the hardcore.
I already have this on pre-order.
“Please be outstanding” was my brilliant play on words. Wasted on the lot of you.
It was better than my play on words anyway.
I got bored after 5 minutes to be honest. Which is odd, since I loved Lego as a child.
Well I spent a couple of seconds pondering over the explosion of that particular literary firework, John. I haven’t had any lunch so it took me a couple of moments to work out whether I hadn’t just misread it. Bravo.
It recognised my 360 pad as the default controller, so it might just be twitchy on which pads it recognises. Demo seems fun, albeit not much different to what I’ve seen in Lego Star Wars but with extra shininess.
In other news, I hadn’t realised that that golden statue had breasts until now.
Does it work with stoneage pixel shader 1.1 cards?
Yes. I think so.
The official system requirements are useless – just say you need PS/VS support and 64MB VRAM, doesn’t state which revision. Helpful.
Ehehe, I just played through the demo with my brother – much more fun with two players. I was using my Xbox controller and he was using my Apple keyboard which is not designed with gaming in mind. He did surprisingly well, nonetheless.
Great fun, though the cutscene audio was out of sync with the video for me, and the keyboard controls were horrible, evidenced by my brother falling down pits time and time again. This game isn’t really suited to the PC platform if you ask me, though I was pleasantly surprised to find it supported all kinds of resolutions, even my native 1920×1200; I hate it when games don’t support widescreen resolutions.
I’ll get this for my PS3 or Wii I think. Probably the former so I can enjoy it in 1080p and with decent controls.
Am i the only one completely not interested in any game lego related?
I wasn’t interested either. But it’s a free demo. Just try it – it was more fun than I expected.
Rook: Feeling a tad negative today are we?
It’s definitely a game better suited to the DualShock than the PC.
Well I like. And as I lack any console thing, I think I’ll be getting this for the PC.
Rook doesn’t get trailers.
I just wanna say that your problem with controllers is probably just an issue with your pc. I was playing and a mate wanted to join in so I plugged my 360 controller into my pc mid-level and it worked! I was really rather impressed. He just pressed start and joined in with no need to quit to desktop
Well, I imagine this is more of yet another case where they haven’t bothered to offer full gamepad support. The 360 pad is quickly become default.
Anyone else play ‘Lego Racers’? (I think I played it on PSX). I liked the ability to create your own car, you could put like 7 rocket boosters on it although I don’t think it made it go any faster. You could make some weird-ass vehicles, though it would have been better if they came flying apart when you hit a barrier.
They should update ‘Lego Racers’.
Pretty sure this is the first E-rated title that lets you play as a Nazi. Or Sean Connery, for that matter.
Question: on my second “free play” playthrough, I’ve gotten to the bit where you have to bring out a Thuggee cultist to pray at the statue of Kali (E rating! woo!) and I’ve gone down into the little area below, used Sean Connery’s magical tile-matching powers to open up the door to the far left, used the Nazi’s magical hand-grenade powers to break the glass and get the…small red thing, now what do I do after I slot the small red thing into the big red thing?
@ mrrobsa: You might want to check out the new Banjo Kazooie. Obviously not Lego, but it seems to be applying similar principles. Plus sticking a load of rocket boosters on your car would appear to have a commensurate effect.
@ Ryan: You appear to have missed this particular controversy.
Since when the hell was there Banjo info kicking around?! That looks freakin banter! KG succeeds at contraptions. Although it has to be said, losing the typical running about as Banjo is a serious loss; one to always feel at the back of your heart as you look towards this shiny new game.
Played it, and it looks like they’ve just added some new graphics to the previous games, I got fed up with the last one, I really cant play the same game three times in a row.
@ The Shed: Earlier today, well yesterday now. Although some screenshots got leaked a few days ago. It might be adviseable to keep any further discussion in the comments for KG’s Rare post.
I’d never played a Lego title before, but this one’s charm wore off fast as I became increasingly irritated with stuff like falling off a cliff and being respawned past the point on the slope where I’d have to be not to keep sliding off over and over, getting depth things like jumping sideways to vines all wrong like the OP mentioned, having to jump to get over altitude differences lower than the thickness of Indy’s foot, and lots of annoyances like having to be in exactly the right spot facing exactly the right angle to get an action to work (satipo wound up beating indy to death with the shovel more than once when all I wanted him to do was dig).
Felt really brambly and unpolished. I’ll give Lego Star Wars a try to see if that’s the norm, because I loves me some Indy (this site needs a memorial/retrospective feature on Fate of Atlantis), but based on this I’m not sure what the fuss is about.
“@ Ryan: You appear to have missed this particular controversy.”
I was aware of it, but “Enemy Soldier” has everything but a swastika and the actual N-word. They’re still Nazis, unless the whitewashing gets really extreme in later portions of the game. It’s a decent enough solution, I think- it’s plenty obvious what they are to anyone old enough, while people who have problems with putting swastikas in what’s nominally a kids’ game (such as, presumably, the ESRB) are mollified.
The fact that the bloke in the demo with Werhmacht-style clothing was chucking ‘potato masher’ grenades sort of tipped me off.
Hmph!
I only got 9/10 treasures, 1/3 “brown things” but I _DID_ manage to post the mail (WHAT?!).
Where is that last treasure? At the end of the boulder sequence?
The controls are kind of funny in all the Lego games. I ran the demo on two machines with very different hardware and os.
One XP with AMD x2 4200, ati 3850 card and a Foxconn MB
Two Vista with intel 8400 and nvidia card on a Gigbyte motherboard
And both functioned the same way with a wired 360 controller. The controls for the game pad have to be manually programed in. Also if the gamepad is accidently unplugged while in game, you have to exit the game because replugging in the controller in game doesn’t work and you have to reprogram all the controls.