Lego Jurassic World Review

Lego Jurassic World Gameplay: 7.7 Graphics: 8.5 Sound: 7.5 Replay Value: 8.5 Overall Score: 8.0Pros:Cool dinosaurs you control; fun puzzles; realistic wordsCons: Occasional bugs; no online play; story can feel too long

 
In Lego Jurassic World you’ll go deep into the most action-filled moments of all four Jurassic movies, exploring the jungle landscapes, futuristic technology and plenty of spooky dinosaurs. But is the game any good?

One thing for sure, it will get your adrenaline pumping. You’ll start at a desert dinosaur site where you use machines to find fossils and build them into skeletons. It’s ingenious that once you uncover the dinosaur skeleton, you use it to climb to a different area. A dust cloud appears, a helicopter lands and soon whisks you away to Jurassic Park.

And the park is awesome. As you proceed, you get to eyeball an intricate jungle environment complete with a splashing, realistic waterfall. I wanted to swim up to the waterfall to see if there was something cool hidden behind it. But I couldn’t. Instead, my character drowned and respawned on the banks of a lagoon.

Soon, you help a Triceratops back to health … by examiningits poop. In fact, you dive right into huge piles of dung to check out what’s in there. Once you feed the dinosaur veggies you find, the beast becomes yours to control. There’s nothing cooler than feeling as if you are a dinosaur. You can charge through amber-colored wooded areas, knock down trees to form bridges and generally enjoy this awesome new power of prehistoric strength.

After the Triceratops knocked down the tree, I encountered my first major glitch. While trying to walk over the tree, one of my characters dropped into the creek below. She could not get out, no matter what I tried. You actually may not encounter this bug. But to me, it was completely annoying. I had to restart and lost about an hour of gameplay time (because I stop to pick up every Lego stud piece as I go).

As in other Lego games, you’ll be witness to a large cast of characters. But these aren’t that iconic, and certainly not as familiar and fun to play as Marvel or DC comics superheroes. Each possesses a certain ability, everything from fixing computers to shooting targets to cutting rope and vines. These powers help you solve puzzles (like opening giant gates) in the particular section you’re moving through.

But it’s the dinosaurs that rule the roost. Raptors are fast, agile and can build things. The big Brachiosaursus stomps really hard. The Dilophosaurus spews poison. There are about 20 of these creatures, and you’ll love playing as all of them. But it’s the T-Rex that rocks the most. You use him like a bull in a china shop to break up everything in an area, including an energy core.

While sections load, you’ll learn lots of dinosaur facts. It’s smart of the developers to give you a small dose of education as you play. One particular nugget of information even compares the height of a Brachiosaurus to thousands of Lego minifigs stacked one upon the other. Fun stuff.

The palpable terror that you sometimes see in the series of movies is replaced by humor, the chuckle-out-loud kind. (Lego games never take themselves too seriously.) Here, characters are often bumbling and a dinosaur might show up wearing a ski cap. Later, in the Jurassic Park 3 section, you have to catapult a blue heron-sized rubber duck at a Spinosaurus to distract him. It’s truly funny.

All in all, the control-the-dinosaur portions of Lego Jurassic World are creative and cool. Yet the other sections are not that new and different. That’s partly because I’ve seen so many Lego games in the last few years, each with similar gameplay. It’s also because the game moves more slowly than others, like Lego Batman or Lego Indiana Jones. The biggest light at the end of the tunnel this year will be Lego Dimensions. That’s the Lego game I’m really waiting for. Until it hits the stores out this fall, Lego Jurassic World is a decent summer diversion.

Lego Jurassic World Trailer