In the latest Traveler’s Tales’ action-adventure cartoon violence, LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures, Harrison Ford continues his career as a toy hero. Unearth the treasure in the latest escapade, where a toy Indy travels through the jungle of South America, filled with Lego-brick trees to the mountain tops of India, exploring caves populated by Lego snakes, battling soldiers, thugs and religious zealots who when beaten collapse into a pile of Lego pieces. A whip-smart fun The Original Adventures follows the basic format of its predecessors, Lego Star Wars and Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy, by setting the first three Indiana Jones movies in the Lego universe.
Whether you play through the game by yourself or with a friend through off-line co-op, you’ll enjoy reliving Indy’s greatest moments Lego-style, while you’re outrunning a blocky boulder or punching bad guys off of trucks. The game takes the fun and creative construction of LEGO and combines it with the wits, daring and non-stop action. The original cinematic adventures from the films are recreated in amusing animated sequences that poke gentle fun at the movies and enthrall audience everywhere. The game characters don’t speak, so if you haven’t seen the films, you won’t be able to follow the stories. The presentation is excellent and the gameplay effectively blends puzzle solving with action. While there are no scenarios from the latest Indy film, these Adventures still provide a worthwhile Jones fix.
Combat in the game is more cute than challenging. Indy can punch or whip opponents into submission, toss them over his shoulder and occasionally grab a fallen enemy’s sword or gun using his whip as a grappling hook. At times he uses it to snare a leading lady to bring her towards him for a quick kiss. But if he’s bested he simply collapses into a pile of Legos and is then resurrected a couple of seconds later. The game also uses character traits in the gameplay. Indy’s snake phobia means that he’ll refuse to move until you clear away a nest of reptiles, while Willie from “Temple of Doom” use her piercing scream to break glass. Indy can't do everything himself so he’s accompanied by various characters from the movies, and the player must switch from one to the next, since they all have different skills. Women can jump higher than the men, while Short Round, the boy from “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” can crawl through small entrances to reach otherwise inaccessible areas.
The game’s puzzles make the player work a little harder, and some are clever, but the puzzles and combat do become repetitive, although not to the point where the game stops being fun. This simple gameplay is appropriate to the game’s primary target audience, children. But the game isn’t about the story as much as it’s about breaking stuff and solving puzzles, the latter of which frequently involves breaking stuff. Smashing Lego furniture releases coins (collect enough to win the title of “true adventurer”) and sometimes piles of tiles that can be used to build ladders and other useful things. The humor is on-target, the action never wears out, the unlockable content and co-op support guarantees numerous replays, and the excellent presentation can make anyone jump at the chance to play this game.
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