LEGOLAND (PC)

While there are plenty of theme park building games, few have an official real world theme park tied to them. However, if there was any amusement park that would be a perfect fit for such a video game, it would have to be one based around actual building toys. LEGOLAND for PC technically doesn’t allow you to reproduce rides from the real LEGOLAND though and is instead a theme park set in the LEGO world with everything being made of LEGO building blocks. Funnily enough though, while the real parks try to integrate creative building into their activities, the game where you should be able to build your theme park how you like instead feels surprisingly restrictive.

LEGOLAND has a story mode guiding play with a small batch of characters such as the park manager and your assistant Jonathan Ablebody who will talk you through whatever you need to do in the game’s ten miniland levels. More important than Jonathan though is Professor Voltage, a scientist who has unlocked time travel but at the expense of the previous LEGOLAND parks. While their destruction was certainly a shame, Professor Voltage now has the ability to go back in time and duplicate objects for use in the parks you’ll be building, this leading to a gradual expansion of the type of themed areas your amusement park can have. Starting off you’ll just have a general LEGOLAND set of buildings and rides, these including the typical theme park fare like food stands, merchandise stores, and simpler thrill rides like a tower drop or a spinning spider-themed machine. New objects will be added to this theme more than others, including a late game injection of dinosaur themed attractions, so while it is the least focused it does in turn offer the most variety, the game even trying to spice things up a little with concepts like a restaurant built to look like an octopus.

The second theme you acquire is far leaner though, there being very little in the Wild West theme of note. A fort with role-playing actors and a log flume are the only real standouts, the other objects found under this tab being things like a bank and sheriff’s office that are more decor than something interesting and interactive. The log flume is customizable and most themes do have something you are able to shape yourself into a more personalized ride, the medieval theme being where you can construct an actual roller coaster for your park. The medieval aesthetic is a rather limited theme in some ways as well, if you want to make a section of your park devoted to it you’ll likely be repeating amusements like the catapult for lack of choices, but the final theme, adventure, benefits from its less specific theming. Adventure includes both Egyptian and jungle concepts, the player able to build pyramids and Anubis statues as well as things like a jungle cruise that don’t feel too out of place beside their thematic companions. Besides perhaps the default LEGOLAND theme there is hardly enough to build an entire park with only one concept being embraced, the game instead encouraging you to have specific sections of your park that embrace the different themes.

However, the limited amount of objects in each theme does become a problem for the game’s ten level story. Each of the minilands, nominally based on real world cities like Sydney, Australia or San Francisco, California, has different goals you need to complete and different items available, sometimes even taking away objects mid-level to try and get you to focus on newly introduced items. However, building theme parks in LEGOLAND isn’t really a matter of resource management or trying to cater to your park-goers’ needs. The people that show up will rarely experience issues and while rides will break down, they do so without any penalty and you can easily have many mechanics wandering around for cheap. Everything in LEGOLAND is far too cheap in fact, your income consistently climbing with almost no expenses to worry about and thus little incentive to try and make your park efficient or really anything beyond a place you plop down objects. Goals in the story mode are often very straightforward as well such as placing down at least one of every object you have unlocked to unlock a few more objects to do the same with. Path building is somewhat automatic since each newly placed amusement has a perimeter made of eligible paths around them and automatically connects to the nearest walkway, and while that would be convenient in a better park builder, here it just makes actually placing objects even less involved or engaging.

Some story levels do try to break away from this monotonous “just place everything down in sequence” model. One has large chunks of your park disappear so you need to start rebuilding them, and two of them are almost more like puzzles, albeit not particularly good ones. One has your park’s rides surrounded by hedges that you need to find a good spot to make an opening in to connect to paths and that’s more a matter of putting in the time rather than figuring them out. Another has you needing to place four rides in specific hedge enclosures. the game insisting the rides will only fit if you place them in the enclosures the right way but there are multiple solutions so you just keep shuffling them around until you find the one the game likes. In stages focused more on building regular parks though there is at least one more consideration than just following Ablebody’s orders though, a park inspector named Mr. Bimble dropping by periodically to rate your park. While he does check to make sure certain attractions are there, Ablebody will have already demanded you place them to continue the level, so mostly pleasing Mr. Bimble comes down to having enough shops and having enough scenery. Since there are no major expenses to worry about you can just plop down shops all around the park to earn his approval, but scenery does seem to be a harder metric to clear. Themes have their own twists on it like cacti for Wild West and jungle trees for Adventure as well as basic plants and flowers for LEGOLAND, but Mr. Bimble really wants your park to be lousy with scenery before he’ll let you pass. What is meant to be a way to ask the player to beautify a park they otherwise don’t really need to consider the aesthetics of too much will ultimately likely turn the place into a bit of a mess as you fill every empty square you can with scenery to finally pass, waiting for Mr. Bimble’s return a rather slow process but thankfully a save anytime feature means you can at least save before an inspection if you’re worried your forest of a park might not please him still.

There is no interactivity with the park rides beyond watching them unfold when people hop aboard, no settings to change like price of admission or the price of concessions, and while watching each new ride get quickly constructed out of LEGO is nifty, destroying them is a pure refund so there’s not even a penalty for messing up. It is clear the game wants younger players not to struggle too much and outside of Mr. Bimble’s obsession with foliage they likely won’t because it’s incredibly straightforward, but you might be wondering why I’ve only talked about the ten level story rather than the ability to build parks freely. Many theme park builders find their appeal in managing a park of your own construction and turning it into something successful, but LEGOLAND’s free play actually removes many of the considerations from the single player to make it even less involved. Electric power is already barely a worry in the story but you won’t even need to build power stations in free play, all objects are free and you don’t need to worry about income, and the building area is huge rather than occasionally having some blockages or odd shapes like in the story’s minilands. It mostly just serves as a way to place down the objects you’ve been placing but now without any consequence, and while this means you can get wild with your roller coaster shapes at least, it does feel a little hollow, especially when you realize you won’t even have access to every object.

When starting free play you need to pick the objects you’ll use for your theme park from a menu, and the first barrier to playing this mode is that you need to unlock all the items in the story before they’re even available for selection in free play. However, even once you unlock everything, you can’t even bring all the items from the LEGOLAND theme into free play all at once. You have an allotment that won’t even match the item freedom featured in many of the story levels, and the idea of building a robust and varied park in free play is scuppered by an oddly restrictive approach to letting you select items. While likely tied to potential memory problems from letting you go nuts in a massive map, simply letting you try and run functional parks in the minilands rather than following the checklist of required actions like you do in story would be a far better way to play and is unfortunately not an option the game was interested in providing. Technically a story level won’t end until you click the the right place after completing all objectives, but the lack of any true concerns when running a park makes sticking around in a stage practically pointless while providing little to hold your interest.

THE VERDICT: LEGOLAND on PC discourages the kind of creativity that the building block toys its based on were built to cultivate. Placement of thrill rides and stores is often fairly arbitrary since you don’t have to worry about your theme park’s income, attendance numbers, cost, or anything that would require a little strategy, and besides a few moments where you can build a roller coaster or have to counter a strange shake-up to the story level design it ends up mostly being a game about completing the park manager’s chore list and then impressing Mr. Bimble with an absurd amount of plants. Free play could have been the game’s last hope but instead it somehow managed to both be more restrictive in limiting your items while also being too freeing as the few considerations like cost and power were stripped out as well.

And so, I give LEGOLAND for PC…

A BAD rating. Beyond that little thrill of seeing which theme park item you’ll get next for placing down the others without any concern, LEGOLAND isn’t a game that offers much with its park building play. The lack of almost any punishment for bad placement or throwing down objects with reckless abandon means it is at least easy to push forward and potentially see something like an animated cutscene involving Professor Voltage, but mostly this game’s desire to appeal to younger players lead to it stripping out the things that make managing a theme park thrilling. Even if it wasn’t trying to be hard it could at least try and make you occasionally consider the cost of something and beyond placing themed objects near each other it could have done a better job of incentivizing placing amusements and stores in conducive locations. Besides doing exactly what Ablebody tells you to in order to progress it feels like your hand in events only really matters when it comes to appeasing Mr. Bimble’s rather uninteresting criteria. Bimble could have been the key to making this more exciting though, if his approval was harder to earn and required more intelligent and directed efforts rather than heaping a flood of flowers across the park he could have been the more difficult way to play after completing objectives that even children won’t struggle with. Free Play is also a surprisingly weak attempt at longevity, squandering the chance for a player to really make their own way and place objects as they please in favor of an open ended mode that removed the wrong limits and added in bad new ones.

LEGOLAND is hardly the chance for you to build your own theme park or even really do much building, the LEGO more of an aesthetic rather than tying into any increased level of customization of what you’re placing. Far too much of the play is about making sure you’ve at least placed one of every available object with no incentive to go beyond save for in bland ways like piling in more shops, removing even the minor appeal of trying to plan how you’ll place the same objects this time around. Simply adding in a park building mode with some bite to it would immediately elevate this because there is enough content for a realized park builder to work with, but much like it only borrows the trappings of LEGO without integrating them, it only borrows the idea of a park builder without any of the management side that could give it even a little depth.