I find myself playing a lot of the Lego games these days,
and a lot of the points I make about them are covered in the review I did of
Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga a while back. Given my preference to play
games in order, and having beaten Lego Star Wars, the next step was Lego
Indiana Jones, and I’ve been playing this game quite a lot over the last couple
of weeks!
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| He doesn't always have that gun... |
The premise of the Lego games are simple enough: Play
through the plot of whatever property they’re based on using Lego characters,
in this case the original Indiana Jones trilogy. They are competently designed,
easily accessible and provide a challenge in puzzles and collectables. The
puzzles are largely based around deciding which characters and their abilities
to use for each level, either to progress through the story or unlock all the
extras later. One slight criticism is that it doesn’t work quite as well in
multiplayer as some of the other games, as this one was designed before they
started splitting the screen to accommodate both players, but as this was very
much a single-player run-through, this didn’t affect me.
I wondered how Telltale Games would make it work with
Indiana Jones, as at first glance there didn’t seem to be a wide-enough range
of characters to make it work, but I soon found an understanding of what everyone
was supposed to be doing. Indy has his whip to swing across certain gaps and
disarm opponents, archaeologists have shovels and can dig for treasure,
mechanics fix things, scholars can open hieroglyphic doors, Nazis can open
certain doors restricted to them and blow things up with grenades and rocket
launchers. The ladies in the game have certain skills that apply to their
characters. They can all jump slightly higher than the men and that is as good
as it gets with Marion, Elsa also has the scholar ability, and brilliantly,
Willie has a scream that can shatter glass and later destroy certain enemies. I
also liked how certain characters have phobias: Indy clams up when he’s near
snakes, and so does Willie when she’s around bugs.
I found Lego Indiana Jones more challenging than Lego Star
Wars, if nowhere near as long having only three films to cover rather than six.
The enemies are harder to take down as in most cases they have to be taken out
in close quarters, and will take three or four hits to drop. Guns will destroy
most enemies straight away but very few of the characters have guns by default;
you need to pick up guns dropped by the enemies. While this rarely gets in the
way of progressing through the game, it can make certain of the collectables
hard to find if you’re not careful.
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| Funny how this scene is so iconic with Indiana Jones, given that it only happens for moments in the film! |
This being a game about archaeology, there are a lot more
traps and puzzles to get around which provide an even greater threat. It’s not
insurmountable though, and there’s a nice sense of achievement when you figure
out how to open a door, or disable a trap. It’s a good way to vary up the pace
and fits the theme of the game perfectly.
But of course, this being a Lego game, the heart of it is
all about the collectables, and this is why it took me a relatively long amount
of time to play through a somewhat short and easy game – I was aiming for 100%
completion. To do this, I had to do the following:
·
Beat the
Story Mode: This is easy enough, you need to get from one end of the game
to the other, although I did get stuck on one of the bosses at some point. It
was the boxer from Raiders of the Lost Ark; I didn’t realise that the plane had
guns you were supposed to be firing!
·
Post all
the Mail: This was a bit of a funny one. At some point on each level there
is a parcel you have to find and put in a red post box. You almost always have to
do this in Free Play mode, as you need different characters to access the
locations they’re in. You’re rewarded when you do by optional ‘Cheats’ you can
buy – anything from faster digging to multiplying the number of studs you pick
up.
·
Collect
all the Artefacts: There are ten treasure chests in each level, and
collecting all ten forms an artefact; an ancient relic of some description that
may or may not have featured in the films. Collecting all of these opens some
of the bonus areas. This provided a challenge to begin with, but it got much
easier once I’d unlocked the Artefact Detector in the previous section. Some of
the things you have to do to make the chest appear are a little contrived, though,
and on these occasions I found myself using a guide to find the last few
chests. By this time I was looking to complete the game, not get bogged down.
·
Achieve ‘True
Adventurer’ on all the levels: This is a feature common to all the Lego
games where you have to collect a certain number of Lego studs along the level
to achieve the reward. This only becomes a problem when you keep dying, because
you lose all your studs. Funnily enough this happened to me because I couldn’t
work out some of the puzzles and traps far more often than getting killed by
enemies. It became much easier to do this once I’d unlocked the score
multipliers!
·
Beat the
Young Indy, Ancient City and Warehouse stages: This is the best kind of
Post-Game content; things that you don’t have to do in order to see the story
through to the end but provide some fun nonetheless. The Young Indy stage takes
you through the opening scenes of The Last Crusade, but there are no
collectables this time; you only need to beat the level. The Ancient City is an
interesting one; you have to destroy some scenery and build some other bits of
scenery to get one million studs. It was challenging because there’s no
guidance on it this time. It’s not a case of getting from one end of the level
to the other; you have to work out what to do with everything in it and the
solution isn’t always obvious. The Warehouse has the same goal, and I thought I
was going to have to faff about making tracks, as that was what some of the
Lego blocks were insinuating. In actual fact, if you head over to the right
side of the level there is a target there which cannot be destroyed and
releases studs every time you hit it; I just did this to beat the level.
Once I had done all that the game was completed to 100%, and
I just had to unlock a few achievement points to get 100% of those as well. This
is one of the few games I own on the Xbox 360 where I have a hope of managing
it, because in this case none of the achievement points are tied up in online
multiplayer. Most of them unlock as you’re playing through the game, some you
have to do by destroying one specific character with another; they were easy
enough. I had a bit of bother with the one where you need to kill five enemies
with one explosion, but after looking at some community advice, I chucked a
grenade onto a group of spiders that rush you in one of the Temple of Doom
levels and the problem was solved. The ones that were hard were the ones that
require you to perform same action multiple times, such as using Willie’s
scream to shatter 50 glass panels, or using the Nazis to unlock their
restricted areas 50 times. It wasn’t difficult, but it was a faff! I found myself
restarting the City of Danger level several times, as there is an opportunity to
do both right near the start of the level.
All this took me about two or three weeks; it’s nice to have
a game that can be fully completed in that time! I’ve really enjoyed my time
with Lego Indiana Jones, and while it will be a while before I come back to it,
it’s there should I ever want to give it another go!
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