We delve into the Latest release from Travellers Tales to see whether the old adage about Movie tie-ins is still the same or if as the first movie soundtrack goes, Everything is awesome.
After the events of the first film an alien attack leaves Bricksburg in ruins, 5 years pass with attacks occuring regularly, Master Builder Emmett travels across the solar system to rescue his pals from the other worldly clutches of the Duplo Aliens. Some of the first major problems i noticed with the game is that it makes liberal changes to the films story, such as, certain characters being kidnapped in the movie, but thats no longer the case in the game and while every location from the film is in the game it misses the events that link them, with only the broad over arching goal of finding your friends bringing the locations together.
The story is given to the audience with naratively delivered cutscenes delivered in the past tense rather than snippets cut from the movie and so none of voice actors from the movie are involved with thier characters, except one, which i feel is a shame especially with a Licensed property that releases at the same time as the movie and is aimed at a younger audience, I had both my son and daughter asking why the story was different and i just couldn't answer the question to thier satisfaction.
The Lego Movie 2 Videogame takes its lessons from previous games in the series with hub levels taken from Lego Dimensions and has you travel around the Hub worlds, there are seven main worlds and 6 smaller ones with my favourite being the Ruined world of Syspocalypstar which is the blank canvas for you to build your own lego creations and place your unlocked content anywhere within the level, most of which is unlocked as you play through the other levels. This involves travelling through the worlds completing quests for NPC's collecting Purple master pieces in order to unlock the portal to the next level. There is a lot of back tracking between the worlds as you need to collect new builds to unlock access to other areas of the level and hopefully finding Relics which unlock other characters and builds.
The developers have improved the gameplay and now the player has to scan objects in order to learn how to construct them, then you have to collect the coloured bricks needed, which drop when you destroy items. The colors are dependant on the object so a tree will drop brown and green blocks. The game still uses the single button press to build objects, keeping it simple. I found myself destoying everything to make sure i had a surplus of as many different colored blocks as possible for when i needed them.
As with all the other Lego games there is a whole host of characters to unlock with over 100 from both of the movies, and each one having a special combo attack that when built up can take out multiple enemies. What i found refreshing in this title was that the developers have changed the way the characters work. In the older games you had to play through the missions in story mode before unlocking free play where you could take in any character to the level and the game would choose a selection of unlocked characters that had the abilities needed to access the hidden areas, so the player could collect all of the gold bricks or red bricks which then gave access to game modifiers. In Lego Movie 2 the ability system has gone and any character can be used and can be swapped out at any point, unfortunately none of the superhero characters have access to their powers but i feel this was done for balance reasons.
During my playtime I encountered quite a few bugs, including items having placeholder names, invisible walls, pathfinding issues when trying to complete quests and most annoyingly of all items spawning from chests only to fall down pits making them uncollectable. All of these should have been found in playtesting and brings a downer on the experience.
The Lego Movie 2 Video game is a nice new addition to the franchise, however I feel the wrong property was chosen in which to introduce some of the changes, such as to the way the story is presented to the player. But, The Lego games formula was starting to get stale and was in much need of a change and by building on what makes Lego fun Travellers Tales have taken a step in the right direction, and whilst I loved the game it didn't seem to meet the quality I expect, and I feel that it was rushed to meet the release window of the movie.
Another few weeks polishing and bug fixing was needed and as such I can only say this is worth getting instead of the coveted Must Buy award.