LEGO Jurassic World (Switch)
LEGO, dinosaurs, and video games. It almost sounds like a list of a young boy’s favorite things, but even once you’ve aged out of sitting on the carpet after school to play with such things, they still have a certain appeal that can be hard to shake. The flexibility of the LEGO building blocks, the majesty and variety of dinosaurs, the creative interactivity of video games… naturally, something existing at the intersection of such interests is bound to have its own appeal, and while it took Traveller’s Tales quite a while to get to this particular blockbuster franchise with their video game adaptations, LEGO Jurassic World aims to provide the appeal of all three of those things whether you’re the kid discovering your joy for them or an adult who never saw those passions fade away.
LEGO Jurassic World adapts the first four films in the Jurassic series, that being Jurassic Park, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Jurassic Park III, and Jurassic World into this game series’s now trademark style of reproducing events but with light humorous twists. While each film has its own tale, generally the Jurassic series focuses on the fallout of the ambitious dream of John Hammond who funded a means of cloning dinosaurs by extracting their DNA from the blood mosquitoes drank before they were sealed in amber millennia ago. The first film follows the immediate issues with trying to commodify this scientific miracle by setting up the dinos in a theme park, while the two follow-ups focus instead on nearby islands which were part of the cloning process but fell to ruin with a more wild and abandoned edge than the immediate aftermath of the escapes seen in the first film. Jurassic World’s later reinvigoration of the franchise returned to the idea of a theme park trying to turn these revived animals into tourist attractions and learned the lesson even harder after their genetically modified monster the Indominus Rex proved to be too much to handle and caused another chaotic dinosaur rampage, each of these films inevitably giving us plenty of chances for some dinosaur action and prehistoric peril.
LEGO Jurassic World condenses the four films into five chapters each, and while you will primarily be playing as the humans caught up in the various dinosaur-related dangers of the plots, you will also get your chance to control a good deal of dinos along the way. Occasionally it will be just for a minor moment like needing to press buttons to have a scripted dinosaur scuffle unfold, but other times you will get your hands directly on something like a triceratops or pachycephalosaurus and feel the difference in strength it provides. LEGO Jurassic World is primarily a game about exploring an area for useful items or finding specific interactions needed to continue, the world itself trying to look naturalistic but interactive objects will be made out of LEGO much like the playable characters. A good deal of time will no doubt be spent smashing breakable objects looking for studs, this currency not only used for buying unlockables later but key to earning a special reward in each level. While the humans have to smack things to break them, the little rampages you can go on as the dinos provide a surge of excitement no matter which creature you happen to be, and their incredible strength can often be used to overcome specific obstacles. LEGO Jurassic World generally spaces out when you get control of dinosaurs to make them feel special, the player not kept from them long but not losing that joy that comes from a chance to play as them. Even in the Jurassic World focused chapters that give you much more time as raptors it still feels exciting to be in control of something that plays differently. Combat isn’t even a huge part of LEGO Jurassic World so its not like you’re some killing machine when you do get your chance to control these once extinct animals, most battles already easy enough just by mashing attack buttons as the human characters while bosses like the stegosaurus scuffle or Indominus Rex encounter focus instead on light and easy puzzle solving to do your damage.
The variety in what you do in LEGO Jurassic World’s story is pretty much baked into the adapted source material. Jurassic Park has a scene where the kids try to evade raptors in a kitchen, so you get to play a version of that but with more ways to distract the carnivores hunting you down. Jurassic Park III has the characters walking across dilapidated rafters in the pterosaur cage, so you get to have some of that peril enhanced by flying reptiles that sometimes swoop in to cause an issue. The Lost World: Jurassic Park of course has to adapt the incredibly memorable Tyrannosaurs Rex rampage through the streets of San Diego, although its methodology for doing so is not particularly the greatest. Most levels in LEGO Jurassic World let you progress at your own pace, free to poke around the area to look for hidden collectibles such as the amber required to unlock dinosaurs for free play, and the roster of character is designed to play into this. Each character has a few abilities and you need to use the right person for the right situation, such as Dr. Alan Grant being able to properly assemble dinosaur skeletons, science inclined characters like Sarah Harding can happily dive into dino dung for important info, or weirdly enough most of the female cast are more agile and can shriek to break glass. You’re essentially managing a tool kit of abilities to platform about and find useful items such as LEGO pieces to instantly build into a required object just by holding down a button, but scenes like the San Diego T-Rex rampage instead turn into action-packed chases.
The chases have you moving forward automatically, the player often able to veer left or right as well to collect goodies, but unfortunately, many of the chases are beholden to an all-too-memorable scene in the first Jurassic Park film. To see the pursuing dino and the vehicle its chasing, we need to have a view that shows what is behind the characters we’re controlling, meaning you’re driving forward into stuff you cannot see. There are a great deal of collectibles to be found during these chases and no quick way to retry them, so rather than being able to focus on the conceptual excitement of trying to outrun a dinosaur that will try to take chomps out of you as you drive, you’re more likely to be muttering in irritation as you missed another collectible you didn’t have the time to drive towards. Chase sections can lose their charm considerably because of a game that usually lets you take your time to collect and explore suddenly yanking away that control and making it difficult to grab what you want without multiple tedious retries, and unfortunately the levels you unlock for beating each film are just those chase scenes isolated. They do at least change camera perspective sometimes and are rarely that long, but they don’t feel like they were considered carefully for how they fit into the game’s typical formula.
What definitely works though is LEGO Jurassic World’s sense of humor. While the game will use a mix of lines lifted straight from the movies as well as some new recorded dialogue from notable actors like Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard plus a good deal of nameless or minor characters being able to carry conversations for slower interactive sections, the physical comedy that alters the scenes can be surprisingly funny. One particular choice leads to a surprising amount of the best scenes, LEGO Jurassic World not wanting to imitate its violent source material and so any character who died or met a gruesome fate instead somehow is saved or has their fate changed in this game’s cutscenes. LEGO Jurassic World is already a bit a parody at times, the dinosaurs will sometimes stop acting like ferocious animals to pull off a gag and when they suddenly act like people after being such threats the shock of it can earn a laugh in itself. It’s the creativity in the game trying to concoct a variety of ways characters could survive their deaths plus the game letting the dinosaurs still be dangerous terrors that makes the moments that invert the expected so fun, and even if you’re not too familiar with a film, the general story is conveyed well enough with these sillier twists making for a more light-hearted but still coherent ride.
As the story missions take you through jungles and research centers, between chapters you’ll be asked to trek through one of the larger hub areas to reach the next story event. All four movies have their relevant islands available for free roam once you’re done playing the plots, and beyond the novelty of returning to memorable or iconic locations to explore at your leisure, you also have a great deal more you can do when there aren’t barriers put in place to keep the story moving. The story chapters already have optional objectives to return to later, your first run impossible to complete fully since you won’t have all the characters needed for every special interaction, but in free roam you can take a gang of whatever characters you like around the islands looking for little challenges to earn the game’s collectibles. Some are a bit more involved than others, little races and timed challenges a bit more demanding than the usual test of using the right abilities, but LEGO Jurassic World isn’t really trying to be a difficult game, a death usually just punished by having you drop some of your studs and respawning quickly enough you have a chance to pick them up. The simplicity does make these more the kind of tasks you’d do if you want a bit of easy pick up and play gaming rather than a long-term rewarding commitment, gold and red bricks going towards unlockables, including one of the most enticing parts of free play: playing as the big dinosaurs.
While you get short spins as some of the medium-sized dinosaurs, free roam is the only place you’ll get to take a turn as a pterosaur or truly get to handle the might of something huge like the T-Rex or a giant like the Brachiosaurus. While they need to be unlocked with amber first, gold bricks open up the pads that can summon in dinosaurs, and while you can always access smaller useful dinos anywhere you like such as the raptors, the big dinosaurs often have specific spots where you’re meant to unleash their might. Even though all the animals are rendered in the smooth plastic style of LEGO figures, the look of the creature is preserved surprisingly well with something like the Spinosaurus is still able to be a fearsome creature just rendered in a cartoon style with some obvious joint lines and subtle connector parts. Playing as a sauropod though will really give you a sense of scale, and while there is a good bit of freedom to travel the island in unlockable vehicles, the special sections for flying and swimming creatures have a special charm and a few designated challenges to suit their unique style. Again LEGO Jurassic World impresses with its ability to make playing as the dinosaurs feel special but not too far out of reach, and even if you don’t feel like poking around the islands for all the collectibles, some chances to let loose as the big guys even when they might not be able to do too much still has an appeal that makes messing around in free roam worthwhile.
THE VERDICT: LEGO Jurassic World gets to have its silly fun twisting events of the four films into something more comedic while still making its dinosaurs feel special and dangerous. While some of that comes from the chase scenes that don’t fit in with the game’s general flow, normally this LEGO game provides a range of locations and short interactions to make simple exploration fun during the story and in the more free form island roam mode. It’s not difficult and combat is barely a factor, but having so many stones to turn to find new goodies keeps things interesting even when you’re playing as the unassuming humans.
And so, I give LEGO Jurassic World for Nintendo Switch…
A GOOD rating. LEGO Jurassic World has that familiar Traveller’s Tales format that usually tends to bring with it a lighthearted easygoing romp that’s a good fit for cooperative play across age groups, and it doesn’t exactly break from that formula in ways that will make it stand out from the other LEGO film adaptations. The island free roam is a better way to add extra longevity than just asking you to replay levels but with all characters available to use their special abilities, but it is a shame the chase scenes were hindered by their cameras so their intended thrills are bogged down by that irritation at missing collectibles you didn’t have the time to snag. Perhaps pulling out the camera too far would rob it of drama too, but all the goodies you uncover are practically the main appeal of a LEGO game like this and taking so much control away feels at odds with the usual leisurely pace exploration is allowed to go at. When you are free to explore it may not exactly be a brain buster to figure out how to get most items, but there is enough variety in the tasks that keep you involved and the simpler ones are short enough to keep you active until the next meatier activity. The dinosaurs are definitely well-handled here though, and while I did wish I could have seen more humor derived from them acting goofy, it was also wise to do it sparingly so that you can still have recognizable iconic moments like the first T-Rex attack in Jurassic Park carry some of their impact even in plastic toy form. Since you’ll be freer to play as dinosaurs after the main adventures it was smart to space them out across the game’s chapters and wait to let you get your hands on the bigger players, although since you can start with either Jurassic Park or Jurassic World you can get some quick and ample raptor time in the latter if you’re feeling impatient.
Like most of these LEGO film adaptations you might want some greater complexity than it offers or a bit more freedom to really work with the bricks, but the reason we keep getting games like this is because it’s an effective and flexible way to bring beloved films to life in game form, the humorous twists and LEGO elements meaning it will inherently not be faithful so it can have a bit more fun while still providing the parts you really want to see. LEGO Jurassic World aims to provide you pretty much exactly what you’d want from its combo of LEGO, dinos, and video games, the fun coming through because it has a good sense of what the player wants from those elements. Pushing the envelope might pull it away from the simple effectiveness on offer, but other games can bring the ambition to LEGO and dinosaurs while this one will be here to offer some reliable entertainment for fans of the Jurassic series.