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REVIEW – The Jurassic Park series has always had a troubled past in terms of video game adaptions. Most of them ended in disaster, and even the Telltale adaption of the series is a wreck.

Traveller’s Tale has been able to successfully adapt most movies, comic book IPs to be fun and exciting. However it seems that Jurassic Park is a cursed IP and not much enjoyment can be squeezed out of it.

It’s alive? Barely….

Here’s what I loved about the Lego games so far: They took an IP and made it funny, interesting, and adventurous, plus the combat was also great, and the bosses were unique. From Lego Star Wars to Lego Indiana Jones, and The Hobbit games, all of them had high quality graphics, humor, and even combat. They also diverged from the original source material in a meaningful way, and never felt it was a cash grab for an IP’s new movie/comic book release.

Here however in Lego World Jurassic Park the entire setup feels weak, and the quality is just so low I barely could continue playing the game. What’s the issue with a Lego Jurassic Park game? They simply made it really boring to play compared to all the other games.

This should have been a Lego Dino Crisis

While most of the Lego games balanced out combat and puzzle sequences, this game is almost entirely filled with puzzles. The boring kind ones where you literally have to find an item in a pile of dinosaur shit just to complete a section. Which brings me to another problem with this game. They did not take liberties with the franchise and decided to copy the plot entirely, step by step, and this results the entire game being mind numbingly tedious.

While the content is for all four of the movies, you’ll just end up wishing that you were playing the previous Lego games with more action.

The environments and level design is okay, but it never really ends up being creative or fun to play. The game also feels barebones in terms of actual content. You get the four movies, five levels per movie, and a bunch of characters, plus dinosaurs for the freeroam option. Is it good? Not really since most of the character unlocks do not really offer that much combat variety, and the emphasis on those characters are once again: Unlocking new puzzle parts on completed levels.

It feels dull, and at this point I wish Traveller’s Tale adapted Dino Crisis from the PS2 era, since that game already had some wacky scenarios.

Lights! Camera! aaaannnnd epic music all around you!

Did you enjoy the epic music of John Williams? Well how about we let you listen to it over and over and over and over, so that when the most tiniest fallen leaf will result in the first movie’s main theme being shoved down your ear just to make that tiny fall the most epic thing ever…. well you’ll be annoyed. Speaking of audio, while the new Lego games had quality dubbing and voice acting, here it is abysmal. It seems that they took the audio from the old VHS tapes and slapped them on to the cutscenes and certain parts of the game.

The camera work is okay for the games, but the graphics are subpar and unimaginative, since they copied everything from the movies. It’s also strange that while the environments, characters look great, the actual dinosaurs look like cheap plastic toys. Which is an entirely weird complaint when it comes to a Lego game, but this was not noticeable in the previous Lego titles.

Maybe next time? 

There’s not much else to talk about, Lego World Jurassic Park is a really boring game, with no new solid ideas, that literally copies the plot without any changes (other than editing it to be shorter than the actual movies). The gameplay is dull, unless you like endless puzzles, the cinematics are subpar, and the constant epic music that blares the player will get annoying sooner or later.

I would not recommend this game, and if you want some Dinosaur action, I would recommend just playing Dino Crisis I and II for the old Playstation games.

-Dante-

Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment Inc.

Developer: Tt Fusion Ltd.

Genres:  Action

Publication: Jun 10, 2015