G4TV

If haven’t played any of the various LEGO Star Wars releases over the past few years, you’ve been missing some of the most simple and entertaining games of all time. If, however, you have played them, chances are you’re pining for a bit more plastic action. The rebirth of another valuable Lucasarts franchise in theaters means another fun LEGO game, this one following Indiana Jones through his first-three cinematic adventures. It’s perhaps not quite as fun as the earlier Star Wars games, but it’s still a blast to play.

The Original Adventures

In LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures you maneuver a chunky Indy across some familiar landscapes from Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. (His latest adventure, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, is surely destined for inclusion in a future release.) You start out in the famous jungle and cave sequence from Lost Ark, fighting your way through booby traps before running away from a giant boulder - now rather blockier than it was on-film.

Overall the game stays quite true to the films, meaning you’ll get to take part in many of their most memorable sequences, like the crazy mine cart chase in Temple of Doom. Just like in the films those scenes are ridiculously deadly, however this time Indy won’t be quite so lucky. You’ll die an awful, awful lot here, usually by traipsing over a ledge into a bottomless pit. Thankfully each death just results in the loss of a few points; your character quickly re-assembled and returned to duty.

Like the earlier LEGO games there are dozens of characters to unlock and control, with different ones having different abilities. Indy naturally has his whip, which he can use to grab objects or swing across chasms. Small characters like Short Round can fit through tiny openings, female characters like Marion Ravenwood are able to jump higher and grab hanging vines, and bad guys like Mola Ram can get past guards that good guys can’t. Naturally, you’ll want to unlock them all, plus all the other goodies on offer here, which will take more than a few play-throughs.

Indiana Jones and the Missing Lightsabers

You might be expecting this game to play just like LEGO Star Wars, and that’s generally true. You still collect LEGO bits as points, build platforms and gadgets out of pieces, and there’s still a strong multiplayer angle here. However, the game has a different feel to it, and not necessarily a better one.

Part of the fun in the LEGO Star Wars games was playing as a Jedi and using your lightsaber and mind powers to turn rooms full of droids into rooms full of pieces. Indiana Jones, naturally, doesn’t have a light saber or Jedi mind powers (or even a blaster pistol). He has fists and a whip, so you wind up just punching a lot to get past tribal or Nazi baddies. Punching just isn’t nearly as satisfying as slicing them apart, meaning combat isn’t all that much fun.

It’s possibly thanks to this that there’s more of a focus on puzzle-solving action than. Most challenges are simple and fun, like having one character pull a lever to open a door for another, but occasionally you’ll find yourself stuck in a room, unsure what to do next. These minor but frequent delays kill the fun in an otherwise fast-paced game like this. Some sort of on-screen indicator to give a little hint on what to do next would have been a big help.

Plasticy Sheen

The LEGO games have never been lookers, per se, but they’ve always had solid graphics and, most importantly, a great style accenting the notion of an evilly possessed LEGO play set. Original Adventures definitely continues the trend, delivering the same sort of clean and goofy looking graphics seen in the Star Wars games. Each character’s simple animations deliver a ton of personality, and while the environments are a bit flat, they set the scene well.

The audio front is a bit of a disappointment, though. Like in the Star Wars games, nobody ever speaks beyond a snicker or grunt, but it’s not the lack of dialog that hurts this one. Surprisingly, it’s the soundtrack. The Indiana Jones theme is about as iconic as they come in Hollywood, but hearing it on endless loop while you battle a stream of re-spawning goons can make it grate on the nerves very quickly. Sound effects, too, are somewhat limited, a pale comparison to the crashes and explosions in the films.

A Raid Worth Taking

LEGO Indiana Jones may not be quite as engaging as LEGO Star Wars, but it’s still a lot of fun to play through. That’s doubly true with a friend. The quest isn’t particularly long, but there’s plenty of incentive for a second run-through (or a third …), and Indy fans will definitely have a blast re-living the original films -- LEGO-style.

Review by: Tim Stevens