The Lego Movie 2 Videogame Review

A LEGO brick house divided.

Now I really liked The LEGO Movie 2, it was a good move into another movie and the focus on growing up in a fun charming world full of imagination and crossovers. So when the game came along I decided I definitely was not too old for this. I loved the LEGO games when I was younger and while nothing ever really will beat LEGO Star Wars I thought it was worth a try.

To be honest, the game does not really compare well to the movie. It’s a bit of a mixed bag, with some good moments and a few too many bad moments. The slight change in gameplay towards LEGO Dimensions and LEGO Worlds is not itself bad but the issue is less the gameplay and more everything else around playing the game.

So the gamplay itself is a little more open than the previous games. Rather than in more traditional games where you travel from point A to B this game has you running around a more open world. But in essence underneath that you are still doing the same tasks of collecting the bits, building objects, beating up bad guys and travelling to the next level. You have an overarching objective to collect Master Pieces and you get these through completing objectives, helping other characters and just digging through the dirt. Collecting enough of these allow you to unlock new worlds to repeat this task as well as quite cool side worlds. This goes pleasantly but fairly uneventfully, and the game can just block your progress and force you to head backwards to grab some more pieces which breaks the flow of fun.

Now what’s good about this game is how colourful it is, and the new plethora of mechanics you get to play with. You get a scanner which gets you blueprints of what you scan which you can then build later, and for interacting with the world you get a sticker gun, brick-breaking gloves and a paint wand to paint blocks different colours.

That’s about it though, and everywhere else the game feels a little cheap. This is particularly apparant in the first scene, where a cheap rendering of the first scene of the movie is played out with you thrown into the game straight after. It’s questionable why this is the case when Warner Bros. published the game, so the actual fully rendered scene could have been accessed fine.

But this will move to the wayside quickly with the other annoyances in the game. None of the film’s voice actors reprise their role with the exception of Elizabeth Banks as Wildstyle for some parts. Relics are collected by the player, which seem to be loot boxes with a different name and unlock blueprints for you to build. The camera jump around a little too wildly for you to ever focus on anything, and all of the dialogue subtitles are placed dead centre of the screen.

The real killer though is the performance issues with this game. It’s not trying to render a massive open world but you still get pop in, framerate drops, screen tearing, and button delays. On a limited range of hardware this should not be an issue. Part of me thinks that it is an issue of time, that they were under pressure from WB to push this out with the movie. The other part of me thinks it’s because a friend of mine who use to work for Traveller’s Tales has moved to a different division and the loss of him had a huge impact, but that may be bias.

Underneath The LEGO Movie 2 Videogame was probably going to be a fun experience, but a few too many errors which are likely due to limited time drag this game down from glory. It manages to hold the fun for little periods of time but that will be entirely dependant on how you tolerate bugs.