Unlike many Lego games, this one has dinosaurs. In most other ways it’s pretty similar.
My spouse and I played through this in the usual way. I would use the GamePad, and she the telly. In this way we both had a full-screen view of our actions, albeit with slightly impaired technical performance.
This game covers the three Jurassic Park films and the first Jurassic World, which was the extent of the film franchise at the time of its release. Although the films have quite dissimilar critical reception, they generally make for equally enjoyable Lego gameplay. It’s the Indiana Jones/Pirates model, where women can jump high and many other abilities are based on tools that the characters carry. In co-op mode there were regular full-screen interactions that would lock out the other player unfortunately, including tedious QTE dino fights.
I really liked having dinosaurs as selectable playable characters, it’s a fun novelty having them as part of your arsenal. The drawback is that anything bigger than a Pachycephalosaurus (a favourite of mine due to its speedy charging run) is relegated to contextual challenges in certain hub locations, and not available at all during levels. They try to get around this by including a handful of baby dinos, and the ability to customise body parts, but I still felt shortchanged a bit.
Each of the four films has its set of levels, taking dialogue from the movies as is standard, but supplemented with some new voice lines during levels (and apparently certain lines were rerecorded to remove swears, for the kiddies). Speaking of which, cutscenes of course are full of slapstick humour, including changing all the character deaths and maulings into more cartoonish situations that everyone survives. It really makes you wonder if these quite violent movies really are appropriate fare to make child-friendly merchandise from.
Anyway, there’s also four sub-hub worlds corresponding to the movies. Appropriate to their reputation, the second and third are a lot more limited and linear, but there’s still plenty to do. Filling these between-level interstitial zones out into explorable playgrounds was the best thing the Lego series has done. Another thing they’ve done recently is skimp out on the end-game bonus levels, but oh well.
Happily, the fact that my spouse had never seen any of the four movies wasn’t too great a barrier to us both enjoying the game. My final thought is that Mr. DNA is a playable character, which is great, and he’s got lots of powerful abilities to boot. Dino DNA!
