The last LEGO game I played was LEGO The Incredibles, which is a solid game and a lot of fun to play. So when Warner Bros gave me a review copy of The LEGO Movie 2 videogame, I was very excited to play! That was until I noticed how different this game is from the other. To avoid giving this game a review that only states the ‘ lesser ‘ stuff, I decided to invite someone that fits in the target audience of LEGO games, my 12-year old brother, Jay, and he completely replayed the game.

We shared our opinions and then wrote this review. I’m hoping that for this game, aimed at children, the help of a child will give a better insight to parents that read this review.

General Gameplay

This game really isn’t created for hardcore gamers, and this is noticeable from the start. Controls are often clumsy and instructions are not always to the point. In recent videogames, the road is often shown in the shape of objectives. This is where you need to be, and when you get there, you have to do that. In this game, there are video tutorials which are nice as it explains in simple language what needs to happen, easily understandable by a little child. But it’s not always to the point. For one boss I had to Google how to continue, because the tutorial wasn’t concise and I, as a 28-year old, didn’t understand what to do. I had just received my shiny new sticker gun, and then I had to climb. The problem was that nothing had indicated that I needed to climb, since, with the new gun, shouldn’t I have to shoot?

When Jay was playing, he didn’t run into this issue, considering he played every LEGO game I own, that didn’t come as a surprise. In the past, I have often bought LEGO games for my own Steam library so he could play them when he came over, so he is used to clumsy controls.

It turned out that Jay fell over the same flaws as I did. Both of us got stuck in walls and fell off cliffs just because the controls weren’t very intuitive and in Jay’s case, after he finished the story mode, he couldn’t continue with the game to do the side missions as he had got stuck in a wall and there was no way to leave it, even after completely rebooting the laptop he was playing on.

Now, I have named a number of bugs that made it tough to play this game and enjoy it, but it wasn’t terrible at all times. With decent graphics and solid frames per second on both systems, this game is playable on basically any PC/laptop, which for this target audience, in my opinion, is very important. Parents don’t want to buy a $2000 PC for their child if they are not gamers themselves, as it’s a waste of money to have a $2000 family PC.

LEGO games are also available in a lot of different languages, so a child can play in their own language most of the time and the majority of children under 9 years old wouldn’t really notice or mind the bugs we ran into. I mean, Jay did get a bit spoiled by having access to my Steam library with 5000+ games.

Story and movie

As a LEGO fan, Jay went to the cinema to watch the movie. At the start of the game the story didn’t line up with the movie, but later in the game, it does line up better. He wasn’t too happy with the start of the game not matching up, but when it did he enjoyed the game much more.

Customisation

Most of the time I don’t care what my characters in a videogame look like, so I didn’t really mix around with the stuff I had, but Jay did and he loved this option. He has been customizing the LEGO characters to a point where they looked like the image Jay has of himself. This worked without issue and would be enjoyable for most children.

Visual and sound

Visually this game is on point. There are no complex graphics which would be weird for a game like this, plus the better the game looks, the higher the PC requirements you need to play it. In this game, we saw decent looking LEGO with movie accurate characters. The resolution is easy to set at whatever resolution you like to play at and the framerate is solid on both systems.

The sound is great, the music is very engaging, and the multi-language dialogue makes this game playable for any age that is old enough to hold a controller and know to press buttons – so basically any child that’s 4 years old or more.

All together

For a full price of 30 euros for this game, we think that the game is overpriced in the current state. This is mostly because of the bugs that are just too obvious and having to reboot the game multiple times to be able to play the game. If TT Games takes the time to fix the bugs, it would benefit the game greatly.

In the current state, 2 months after the initial release, we decided to not judge it for the bugs. although 2 months is plenty of time to do bug fixing. We used 2 different systems to play this game on, so we’re going to assume that it’s not a problem with our systems.

With a potential audience of children 4 to 12 years old, and the potential to fix the bugs, we decided to rate this game:

7/10 – This game does not live up to its price tag, but for children that can look through the bugs, it’s playable.

Title: The LEGO Movie 2 Videogame
Genre: Adventure
Developer: TT Games, Feral Interactive (Mac)
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, Feral Interactive (Mac)
Franchise: LEGO
Release Date: 26 Feb, 2019

We want to thank Warner Bros for the press copy of this game!

Steam page

Eddie played on:
Intel Core i9 9900K 5.0 GHz
Nvidia Geforce RTX 2080 TI
G-Skill Trident 64 GB DDR4
Resolution: 1440p

Jay played on:
Intel Core i5 7300HQ 2,7 GHz
Nvidia Geforce GTX 1050 (4GB)
8GB DDR4 (laptop)
Resolution: Full HD