Difficulty:

Very Easy

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Disappointing"

Traveler's Tales do one thing and one thing only: make Lego games. Any young-hearted fun-loving gamer has played at least one by now, whether it's Star Wars or Harry Potter or Pirates of the Caribbean or Lord of the Rings. Even the Indiana Jones trilogy has been Legoized. Making Lego games out of trilogies and sagas is something that Traveler's Tales does really well, but they seem to have hit a wall when it came to making a game based on one movie. Instead of developing a lengthy adventure of the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, they padded the rest of the game with a redux of the previous Lego Indy games.

The core gameplay is still as fun as any Lego game before it. You run around destroying blocks with fists and plastic weapons collecting millions upon millions of studs. You still build all sorts of Lego objects and cars and look for hidden power up bricks. It's the way the game goes about presenting you with these gameplay opportunities that might not be as appreciated as well as in former entries.

To start things off, there is no central hub that connects every chapter together. Rather, each chapter has its own hub. This might seem that it presents you with more freedom, but the story levels still need to be followed in a progressive order and hidden areas and other unlockables can only be accessed after you've unlocked certain characters. Now, it's the character selection that proves to be one of the more irritating features in the game. You cannot select from every possible character type at will. The main characters will follow you around, but if you need a rocket launcher type, you may have to run to the other end of an island to the base where he spawns to switch to him. It causes unnecessary backtracking.

The other major problem with the game are the levels themselves. Although each chapter now has 15 levels (5 story, 5 revisited, 5 bonus) as opposed to the previous Lego trilogy games only have 6 per chapter, these levels are tiny. Story levels rarely last more than 10 minutes and some are so short, they're over in just a couple minutes. They can be revisited with a preset loadout of characters, but in some cases the revisited levels are even shorter. Bonus levels are a lot of fun, though, as each one is a booby trap infested pit of puzzles. Still, having a larger number of shorter levels is not much compromise when it comes at the expensive of lengthy well-designed levels.

If you loved searching for the mini-kit canisters, you will not find them in this game. That's right, there are no mini-kits to be made. Instead, you can collect artifacts, 15 in each chapter. Doing so grants you golden treasure chests that you can destroy for pieces and build a spaceship or a UFO or an exploding volcano; something that will whisk you away from the hub and into the Super Bonus Level. These simple stress free levels have you collecting 1,000,000 studs, and it's a nice way to wind down the long grind of finding all those artifacts.

There are also issues with controls and ally AI. Each chapter has a driving stage, and each one of those driving stages will not be looked forward to. Driving has never really been Traveler's Tales' strong point, but they have succeeded if only to make the driving worse in this game. Vehicles now have suspension and clip very easily, which of course means you'll roll your vehicle over and over again. There's also the wonky bumper car physics which will somehow bump you back 10 feet in your truck when you've tapped a motorcycle. There's also the aiming mechanic of holding down X and moving the analogue stick to aim at a shootable object, which sometimes doesn't work at all, having you careen your character off a cliff when you were expecting to see a reticule moving.

Ally AI just doesn't seem to get any better with partners unable to beat up enemies or simply not doing anything all. Sometimes they have no idea you need them to stand on a tandem switch, and they love to get in your firing line when you're shooting at a target, not taking the hint to the move out of the way. Also, being bumped off platforms or having someone jump at you right when you're jumping makes some bonus levels a tad more frustrating than need be.

Lego Indiana Jones 2 does feature a robust level creator that lets you create levels from scratch or edit existing ones. Its tutorial is very brief, though, leaving a lot of details out. Its item purchasing system is also a bit cumbersome, and many attempts to 100 percent this mode have failed as a result. You can get really creative with the creator, coming up with some wonderfully inventive puzzles, but the real shame is there's no way to publish your levels and share them. Unless you have friends willing to come over and see your work, there's virtually no incentive for exploring this feature unless you want to 100 percent the game.

At the time of its release, Lego Indiana Jones 2 set the bar for Lego game graphics. The Legos themselves are very realistic. You can almost feel the smooth surfaces of the flat pieces and the bumps of the studs and the corners of the plates. Each character has that whimsical charm about them that only Lego can do. The environments that these bricks are built on are rendered well and look realistic. The camera effect of blurring out objects in the extreme foreground only enhances the realism. Special effects are about as standard as they have been with Lego games, but it's always a joy to see something blow up into a shower of studs.

Traveler's Tales also knows how to take audio source material and put it to good use. Using John William's original scores lends a mighty hand to the game's authenticity. It cues in with different pieces when you reach certain areas and heightens when action is about to happen. The sound effects are about the same as they've ever been, though. There's the snapping of bricks being put together, explosions of them be broken apart, and the plastic rain of studs as they cascade along the floor. The voice acting is the traditional incoherent mumblings that always manage to illicit at least a smile, especially when you hear Mola Ram chanting "RA-REE-RAH!"

Lego Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues is an example of what happens when you break formula and try something new. It's a very risky thing to do, and in this case, it did not pay off. Sure, there are more levels to play, but there are even less truly noteworthy ones. Instead of enjoying a fully fleshed out adventure for the Kingdom of the Crystal skull, we instead see half the game reserved for Indy trilogy retreads. What's even more disappointing is that the game's humor isn't as solid as previous Lego games. It's a fun game that any Lego fan will like, but it just leaves so much to be desired.