LEGO Jurassic World – Review

It’s a modern day miracle; those darn dinosaurs are back on the big screen and have managed to squeeze their way onto gaming consoles with a helping hand from LEGO. Yep, the behemoth that is LEGO has snapped up another franchise, the Jurassic Park one to be exact. How will these mighty beasts transfer their ferocity to LEGO bricks? Have we seen enough LEGO games already to cause LEGO Jurassic World to suffer from being more of the same?

There is a part of me that does feel that the abundance of LEGO games in the market right now is getting to the point where you may need to skip some to appreciate the ones that interest you the most. As I’m sure you’ll realise from reading this.

When a blockbuster film hits the cinemas, it is expected to see some form of video game or app tie-in and that’s what we’ve got with LEGO Jurassic World. Not only is the latest film represented in LEGO blocks but there’s also room in the game for the entire Jurassic Park trilogy that came before it. It’ll take you through all four films in order, re-living the iconic moments and aiming to deliver classic Jurassic environments to explore.

Smashing up everything in sight is the main order of the game as most levels require items to be found to progress any further. The problem I have with that is the fact that we’ve been doing this for a while now, basically whenever a LEGO game comes out. Even just within the twenty story levels present here it became a rather monotonous act which we’ve begun to rather accept. And you can accept just that from LEGO Jurassic World as long as the accompanying objectives and level ideas step up to the plate.

Other scenarios it might take you through include being chased by dinosaurs, helping sick ones and participating in dinosaur versus dinosaur. The chases all get a bit samey due to occurring too often, although racing through the streets whilst a T-Rex is charging towards your vehicle was a highlight. It’s obviously pretty cool to take control of a dinosaur in a form of boss battle, even if it is just following on screen prompts, the action itself can be enjoyable. Dinosaurs can be used as characters in some parts too which enables the more strength based destruction to occur; most are similar in usage and stature to the big figs of LEGO Marvel and LEGO Batman, although the likes of the Triceratops dinosaurs are considerably larger.

The moments that everyone remembers from the original Jurassic Park, and even the moments I personally witnessed for the first time from the current Jurassic World, are delivered darn well in the classic LEGO way. They are always on point whilst also quick to defuse the spine-chilling parts with humorous spots. When that giant T-Rex eye peers into the vehicle the nostalgia is too much to handle and it made me want to watch the film immediately. Sadly just like the film series, in the middle somewhere, I just lost interest far too often.

Being surrounded by a jungle style environment for a lot of levels probably didn’t help, but neither did the poor sound quality. I understand why they’ve added sound bites straight from the movies for certain characters but either the source material hasn’t aged well or it has been poorly implemented. It worked better for Jurassic World, however for the rest it’s difficult to understand what’s being said without subtitles.

With over 100 characters, not including the variations, there should be a dash of freshness from using different ones. Unfortunately once you’ve got your hands on a Raptor, a baby T-Rex or even the legendary Dr. Hammond, are you really going to be excited to unlock or use random workers and characters I barely remember? The answer is no, because unlike a lot of the large rosters in LEGO games, these aren’t blessed with superhero powers or unique character traits as such. I can literally count on my fingers the humans I wanted to use in the adventure.

Once you are done with re-living the stories, whether there’s anything else for you to do will depend on your need to unlock more Gold Bricks, Red Bricks and characters. Sure, there are a few bonus levels but just the free-roaming of the islands is where you’ll find most things to do such as healing sick dinosaurs, helping workers in peril etc.

I felt like nostalgia was the best part of LEGO Jurassic World; re-living the iconic moments, especially from the original Jurassic Park, was a welcomed trip down memory lane. This is LEGO though so if you’ve played a lot of these games then, as it was for me, this might be one too many. Mindlessly smashing bricks using regular folk as characters generally becomes boring and even for a child I don’t feel like the excitement for that action comes until the dinosaurs are in play. The humorous moments came few and far between; at times it actually made me jump when a dinosaur pounced out of nowhere.

LEGO Jurassic World might bring dinosaurs but other than that there aren’t enough new ideas to make the gameplay stand out against that seen in the other recent LEGO games. If all you care about is re-creating the magical moments of the film then, sound issues aside, it does the job.