Thoughts About Lego Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues

To be honest, I’m starting to get a little bored of the Lego themed games. They are all good games, they’re just starting to become formulaic. In each and every game, your avatar — be it a Jedi, Indiana Jones, or Batman — is sent through multiple levels looking for bricks to break, then to build, which allow him to solve puzzles, which in turn allows you to progress to the next level. Once you’re played through the level, you play through again as different characters in search of hidden mini-kits and gold bricks to unlock bonus content and achievements. Rinse and repeat.

Lego Indiana Jones 2 (LIJ2) breaks out of this mold (which could actually be called a rut) somewhat. The most notable change would be the addition of a “hub” to game. Instead of playing one level after the next, after each level your avatar is taken to a hub area where you can free roam the environment, solve puzzles to unlock more characters, vehicles, and game widgets, and find your way to the next level at your own pace. At first I didn’t like it, but the concept grew on me.

Gone are the endless replaying of levels to try and find the bonus mini-kits — also on that note, gone are the mini-kits. Instead, when you replay a level, it’s loaded as a bonus level presented as a mini game and not just the same level, with the same objective, played as a different character. There bonus level were also much shorter — the average time it took me to play through them was about three minutes. This also was a welcomed change.

Even with these (and other) changes to the Lego game gimmick, at it’s core the game still played like all the other Lego games available. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you only intend to play one iteration, (Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Batman, or Harry Potter) otherwise the game become very tedious, very fast. And if you’re like me and want to try to harvest as much gamer score out of a game that you can, be prepared to spend an unhealthy amount of time rehashing the same level over and over again.

If I hadn’t played any of the other Lego games, I would score LIJ2 a full two points higher — but I just can’t get past the repetitive, sometimes mindless tasks. My final score: 5/10.

You'll enjoy your time here in the hub.