I’m a fan of the Lego crossed with various film franchise games. I’m not sure I could tell you why. They’re not particularly ground breaking, or have original stories and sometimes aren’t even that funny.
I think it’s the same reason so many people are addicted to stupid phone apps like Angry Birds and so on. It’s the little effort put in for regular rewards mentality.
I smash a few bricks, run around for a bit and then I can play as Yoda. Yay!
I’ve played through and completed almost all of them. I’ve only missed Harry Potter Years 1-4, Indiana Jones 2 and the Clone Wars (though played demos for all three).
I maintain that the best of the whole set was the first and original Lego Star Wars, which covered the movies from Episode 1 to 3. Lego Batman 2 is a close second, but only because it does a few things I don’t like that Lego Star Wars didn’t do.
Here’s a rundown of a few ways I think any future games (I’m looking at you Lego Lord of the Rings!) could tweak the already tried and tested successful format to actually make a more enjoyable and re-playable game.
Levels
Puzzles Placement
One of the main things that I believe should be sorted out is puzzle placement in the levels. This is the main reason I didn’t bother with the first Harry Potter game. I think the Lego game’s main play through should be all about running, jumping and fighting – i.e. a standard platformer. A few basic puzzles to make levels a little more interesting is all fine. For example, the various times in Lego Star Wars where a Jedi would have to jump across a series of platforms to pull a lever allowing a path for a droid to walk across. Lego Harry Potter was all about solving a ‘puzzle’ every few steps you took and it got so tiresome.
My favourite level in any Lego game is still the Jedi Arena Battle based on Episode II, in which Mace Windu comes to the rescue of Obi Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker while they are on the Geonosian homeworld. It’s all action, with a never ending flow of battle droid and Geonosian enemies coming at you while you attempt to both defeat their leaders and free your allies.
More complicated puzzles do have their place however. I think that place should be just for unlocking the various collectibles such as the minikits. Lego Star Wars often had a hidden room that could only be accessed in freeplay with a character who would need to have been unlocked and brought in later. The secret room would have a puzzle in it that would reward the player with a kit piece.
If you weren’t interested in finding the extras, then you were free to enjoy the action as normal without the tedium of smashing everything before you could move on.
Puzzles
Speaking of which, breaking everything in a room is not a puzzle. Too many of the recent titles rely on you simply breaking every item you can find in order to continue. A puzzle should require you to use a bit of brain power to maybe decide which items need to be smashed and which might need to just be moved or left alone.
These puzzles are especially tiresome when you simply HAVE to complete them in order to progress through a mission without intending to find the collectibles. The game mechanic means that you will have to play every level at least twice to get everything. This means you have to break every damned thing in every damned level twice just to trundle along.
Basically, the point here is that a puzzle should be a puzzle. You should be presented with what your goal is clearly and it is up to you to figure out the means of getting it. Say, you can see the minikit inside a glass case, and you need to find a way to open it. In the room are a few things that can be moved around to be arranged into something else. Figuring out the correct order releases the prize. Not as it has been, that smashing everything somehow releases the prize with little logical reason.
Segments
One of the more frustrating things as the games become more cinematic is that each level is increasingly made into separate segments. Once you get through one, you go into the next (usually after a cutscene) and can’t return to the previous.
This is fine in story mode and tends to add to the drama (as much drama as you can get out of Lego). But in Free Play it is a massive nuisance if you get to the end of the level and realise you’ve missed a Minikit and can’t go back and try to find it. Instead your only option is to restart the level and redo everything that you did, desperately trying to see if you missed something.
This happened only in one or two stages of Lego Star Wars, which at the time was acceptable. It was easy enough to remember the levels you couldn’t run back through and it wasn’t many anyway. Now, it is practically every level and several times in each.
Secret Lego City
I really dislike these Lego City levels that they insist on crowbaring into every game. The idea is to collect a million studs by smashing everything in the city. Some things need to be smashed in a certain order and more often than not it is illogical. You might try to break something and find that it’s indestructible, so you leave it. It later turns out that you can break it, but not until you break the thing next to it. Or other times, you might have a character you can throw a bomb or do a ground pound smash. You expect that to break anything in range, but some items can only be broken by a direct punch, so you again miss them thinking that overkill should have done it.
There are often silly hidden studs that you get just by running on a certain small patch of grass or something. Too many times I’ve been in one of these levels with only a handful of studs left to my target, but nowhere I can see to get them from. It’s infuriating.
I much prefer the proper bonus level – the ones that actually feel like they have something to do with the rest of the game. Lego Star Wars had the bonus Tantive IV mission where you could play as Darth Vader and Lego Pirates had the theme park ride as a bonus level. That made hitting 100% completely worth it. The Star Wars Bounty Hunter missions too were a lot more interesting.
Hubs
In the early days, the hubs were simple. A building with a number of doors leading to the various levels. In the hub would be a store where you could buy bonuses and characters, gain access to secrets and sometimes see your Minikit collection.
This did fine, but as more titles were released, the hubs began to evolve too.
In many ways this has been for the better.
The hub has evolved from Lego Star Wars simple diner to Lego Batman 2’s entire free roam Gotham City.
Now the hub holds more secrets than any individual level, being the place to seek out unlockable characters, red brick power ups and other collectibles.
In Lego Batman 2 you were free to use any unlocked vehicle to cruise or fly through Gotham as you explored and searched for items. This was great. It kept the hub a part of the game world rather than a mechanic to get between levels.
Lego Pirates of the Caribbean had an explorable pirate port in which more areas could be unlocked by collecting gold bricks. This was good, as it kept you going as you wanted to find out what else was being hidden from you.
Lego Harry Potter 2 allowed you to explore Hogwarts and parts of London and worked seamlessly with the story missions. It took a little while to find where you could re-enter story missions, but it made the world feel a lot bigger.
Unlocking Characters
Early games had a simple system. Any good guys that you played in story mode would be immediately unlocked. Any villains would have to be defeated in battle in story mode and then purchased for a number of Lego studs in the hub shop.
This system has varied in a few ways over different titles. In Lego Pirates, you would have to defeat the enemy characters in a story level, then hunt them down in the hub, duel them again, defeat them and then purchase. This was sometimes frustrating as the character you wanted to find was not always about when you wanted them to be, and sods law would usually have it that if they were around then you could not afford to buy after fighting them.
Lego Batman 2 had a similar system although it did not require you beating a villain within the story. Each bad guy was hiding in a specific place that never changed in the city. You would find them and fight them in a mini boss battle. When you won, you could buy them. Once defeated, you wouldn’t have to fight them again. This was a great mechanic, but it was a shame that many of the boss fights were uninteresting. Imagine, Killer Croc being no more of a threat than the Mad Hatter. A handful of the bosses had something a little more fun about them (e.g. Killer Moth), but most had very little reflection of what the character was about. Seeing as most of the villains were no shows in the story, it was a shame that they didn’t have a moment to shine in the hub. So far, this has been the most fun way to collect characters, but it would be better if they could take the opportunities to polish the method up.
Hub Fights
One of the little fun things that made the original game so much fun, which seems to be missing from many of the later titles was the way that when unlocked characters were wandering about in the hub, they would pick fights with enemies. E.g. Darth Maul would be strolling in the parking lot and bump into Shaak Ti and Kit Fisto. You’d then witness an exciting fight, in which you could take sides (if you wanted to). It’s only a little thing, but it’s fun (and makes sense).
Characters
Voices
Up until Lego Batman 2, Lego characters would speak only in grunts and mumbles. This worked early on, but when the chosen franchises began to need a bit more explanation in the storylines, cutscenes just got confusing and almost meaningless. Characters would be waving around signs and photos of the things that they were meant to be talking about in an effort to be understood. I think the choice to have Batman, his allies and enemies speak properly was a great move. It should have been done earlier.
Variety
One of the great things about Lego games is that they always say something like ‘Play as 50 of your favourite characters’.
The problem with this is that it includes characters like the Gonk Droid, Vicky Vale and Muggle Child etc i.e. completely useless characters that have no ability to do anything of any use.
The other downside is that you may be able to play as a range of exciting heroes like Mace Windu, Obi Wan Kenobi, Kit Fisto and Luke Skywalker, but there is absolutely no difference between them besides aesthetics. It rarely feels like you are playing as that character when they do not have signature moves that set them apart from the rest.
So when you cut out the useless characters and count all the clones as one, you normally end up with a reality of a choice between about 6 at best.
Lego Star Wars 2 actually made a pretty good attempt at mixing up the individuals. Chewbacca was able to rip out his enemies arms, while Leia would slap her foes. This is the sort of thing we want to see.
Weakened Characters
Sometimes the mechanics of the Lego games somewhat ruins the power of characters as they appear in the original media.
One who I feel particularly suffers is Green Lantern in Lego Batman 2. He is meant to be one of the most powerful heroes of the DC world, but in this game his only special ability (besides flight) was that he was the only person who could manipulate glowing green bricks. Sinestro got off even worse. He should have had the same power as Green Lantern, but did not even get that.
The other form of weakening that sometimes happening is removal of powers in sequels. In original Lego Star Wars (I know, I keep going on about it), General Grievous and the Gungans could jump super high. In the Star Wars Saga, they no longer could. Similarly, in Lego Batman, The Riddler and Mad Hatter had mind control powers of which they were robbed in its sequel. It’s sad that a favourite character like The Riddler’s only special ability is that he can open his own riddle boxes.
Even Batman and Robin felt somewhat nerfed. They relied on various suits for their abilities, whereas I believe they should have been able to do more as standard. Batman should have had the ability to glide at all times, while Robin should always have been acrobatic. The Caped Crusader is the title character of Lego Batman 2, yet he became more and more useless as more characters were unlocked who could do what his suits did for him.
Bad Guys Together
In Lego Star Wars, if you played as a battle droid, then other battle droids would leave you alone, believing you to be one of them. There’s none of that any more. If you play as The Penguin, his goons will target you just as if you were Batman. It just seems a bit silly and takes away one of the bonuses of unlocking the villain characters.
Build Your Own
Now this was something missing from the first game. It was exciting when (in the second Star Wars game) you could make a Darth 3P0 or Wookiee Fett.
The idea was that whenever you unlocked a character you gained their body pieces so that you could rearrange them into new people that could then be used in free play.
It didn’t quite work out. Not all characters became available to rejigger which meant all that time waiting for a certain piece sometimes never came.
The other (probably even more annoying) problem was that you could not assign any special abilities to your creations. You could give a guy a lightsaber, but that didn’t make him a Jedi.
Some games really needed this addition, particularly Lego Batman 2, which is all about superheroes! Imagine! Superheroes without powers! Lego Batman 2’s character creation was even more irritating as it limited the choices for customising. If a character had a cape to start with, you could not remove it or change its colour. If they had a weapon, they could only equip similar types of weapon.
What I want to see is a choice of the complete range of unlocked characters, with all weapons and abilities to choose from.
In Lego Indiana Jones all I wanted to do was make another Indiana Jones who had a whip and a gun. It wouldn’t have been difficult! But it was not to be.
In Lego Batman I wanted to make an Iron Man lookalike who could fire lazers, rockets and fly. It shouldn’t have been too much trouble.
Choice of Characters
Something I have wanted since the first game is the option to choose the entire team I take into free play rather than being given the random selection. It’s only a little niggle, but it sometimes feels weird seeing the likes of Harry Potter and Voldemort running about side by side solving puzzles.
I realise that the game gives you a selection that you require to get through levels successfully, but they could put in a warning or something to let you know you need someone with a certain ability to play.
Collectibles
Finding Collectibles
Basically reiterating the previous points about puzzles in levels. Finding collectibles should not be a case of smashing something random or walking into an invisible area of the level. The earlier games were able to put in better puzzles to gather Minikits, so the later ones have no excuse.
Many now just require you to have a specific character in your selection who is able to activate something and release the prize e.g. The Joker and The Riddler crates in Lego Batman 2.
Vehicles
Vehicles have always been an odd one in the Lego games. In the first one, the vehicle levels were on train lines and you would follow the set path to the end.
Later they changed it to a better more free moving style. Vehicles then worked similar to characters, so you could unlock more and use them in free play to solve hidden puzzles just as you would in any other level.
Lego Batman 2 allows you to use your vehicles in the streets of Gotham, but they are quite redundant when you can simply play as Superman and fly through the skies.
I liked how Minikit vehicles would sit in the parking lot of Dex’s Diner in Lego Star Wars when built, but I also think it’s great to be able to get in them and use them in game. Similar to my point about characters, I think the vehicles should feel unique. Many of the Lego games vehicles fall down as they all handle in exactly the same way. They should all have their own pros and cons.
