i mean, it's a traveller's tales movie-tie-in lego game, not much more you can really say about it from a gameplay standpoint. making custom dinosaurs is always fun though.

i know the lego games sense of humor is more from the physical comedy and dialogue, but those weren't the funniest parts of the game for me, oddly enough. the funniest bits for me came from watching TT duck out of every single visible kill in the films (yes, the toilet lawyer and nedry are okay, they just get ditched on the island), noticing the drastic difference in sound fidelity between the game voice acting and the spoken audio ripped from the films, and finding out bryce papenbrook was a voice actor in this.

i'm a grown-ass man playing a video game aimed at kids, i don't know where my life is anymore.

41

Amongst the countless LEGO games released throughout the last 18 years, we’ve gotten some absolute bangers with LEGO Batman: The Videogame, LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga, and my favourite—LEGO Marvel Superheroes; however, there are always bound to be some that are nothing more than average, and this is one of them. I’m amazed at how consistently Traveller’s Tales picks franchises that simply don’t translate well to their formula. I mean sure you can have the witty humor, the massive character rosters, and abundance of collectibles; but none of that really matters if the foundation is shaky at best.

Some of this really works! The story levels are fun to go through for the first three movies, with World easily being the weakest for reasons we’ll go through later. Jurassic Park, The Lost World, and Jurassic Park III are adapted almost perfectly; the levels are kept short, they contain engaging puzzles that aren’t too repetitive, and are mostly entertaining—with humor that occasionally works. Although I’m bothered by the fact that the opening scene of The Lost World isn’t adapted at all—strange, considering it has the most potential for a funny moment with the hilarious transition of a woman screaming turning into Jeff Goldblum yawning… but whatever I guess. Jurassic World on the other hand isn’t that good… It’s honestly a fucking snore-fest, which is odd considering the game is named after the movie; it’s clear that almost no effort went into those five levels, as they completely throw pacing out the window, they drag on endlessly with monotonous objectives and boring gameplay mechanics (the camouflage). I like the dino fights though! Those are definitely fun for the sheer spectacle of it all, but they don’t offer much in terms of gameplay besides spamming QTEs. There are also these out-of-level segments where you have to clear a path to progress to the next level, and they suck; I sort of miss the days where you’d have a set of doors to walk through or a quick menu, because anything other than that just aims to waste your time. Bonus levels are present here too, and those are a joke; they’re literally just the chase sections ripped from the main levels, all six take about 10 minutes to do and they’re laughably stupid.

I’d say the biggest issue with this game is the voice acting, or should I say lack thereof. It’s all taken from the movies; and it sounds like shit. It never stopped taking me out and was incredibly distracting throughout the entire game. Just hire some fucking actors please! It all sounds so cheap and fake, not to mention that it takes away from the humor since they’re constrained by the movie’s lines. They can’t add any jokes that aren’t just mindless mumbles, and it’s noticeable when compared to their other games. One thing that I’m happy they took from the movies is the soundtrack though, it’s always nice hearing those iconic themes as you’re doing typical, mundane LEGO stuff—and it never really gets old.

As I said before, the foundation for this game is a bit iffy, as it’s just Jurassic Park—like what can you really do with the character roster? The world? And this exact reason is why the game is so middling. Is it cool that it contains 140+ characters? Yeah. Is it cool that it has all four islands? Yeah. But it’s not cool that all of those things are boring as hell. This is one of the worst LEGO rosters because these characters are not fun to play as. The Dino’s are nice though—but again, there’s not much you can do with any of them. And two of the hubs—which are forests (I hate forests) are essentially just narrow lines that have some of the most repetitive activities I’ve seen in a LEGO game. Oh and since this is indeed a LEGO game, expect loads upon loads of bugs that softlock/hardlock your progress. Like fucking hell, can they ever optimize a game? Guess not.

Playtime: 21.2 hours

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One of the best Lego games and that's seriously saying something.

Perfect open world, perfect vibes from the films, perfect humor, and YOU GET TO PLAY AS THE DINOSUARS!!!

Love love love it!!!