LEGO Jurassic World — ★★
Spanning across the Glitchaceous period.
LEGO Jurassic World, unfortunately, follows in the footsteps of its developer predecessor, LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham, and disregards the nostalgia of its material for multi-step puzzles that get annoying very quickly. Furthermore, it is abundantly clear from the ridiculous amount of bugs and glitches that the game was pushed out far ahead of its polishing just to release with the 2015 film Jurassic World.
Jurassic Park
Easily one of the most notable and classic films from the 90’s, Jurassic Park is torn apart and rebuilt with several multi-step puzzles and reversed deaths just to build more while remaining kid-friendly. Reality check, Traveller’s Tales developers: kids, like me back in the day, watched Jurassic Park and know dinosaurs would eat people.
Jurassic Park: The Lost World
Easily the most forgettable and boring entry in the franchise, the Ian Malcolm-led movie is made even worse by Traveller’s Tales, thanks to stretching out levels by doing things like building/painting cars (that happened when in the movie…?) and going around a level just to build a zip-line (again, when…?).
Jurassic Park III
Easily the Jurassic Park film that could’ve been, III’s mistake comes fairly early in the film when a Spinosaurus takes on the king, T-Rex, and wins in the most disgraceful way. As a means of a silver lining, this is one of the handful of things Traveller’s Tales’ overdone censorship helps by not showing either side as victorious. Furthermore, this is the film the game’s counterpart follows most faithfully, and doesn’t derail with too many pointless puzzles.
Jurassic World
Easily one of the highest grossing movies ever (no, really, look it up), the latest entry in the franchise was handled beautifully by Colin Trevorrow — not so much by Traveller’s Tales, who, once again, stretch out lesser scenes from the film and cut short ones that could actually be engaging and fun as a playable map. Take the Gyrosphere escape for example — is there any particular reason we are being handed another chase level and have to collect minikits? Why do we need to set up a plasma/electricity missile launcher to fight Indominus and help the Raptors?
Oh, the bugs…
50% of the reason for such a low rating for LEGO Jurassic World comes from Traveller’s Tales’ incessant need to force more into their games, when simple and fun works just great (i.e. LEGO Indiana Jones); the other 50% is from not being able to have a single play session without some kind of bug or glitch. I have gigabytes of 720p60fps footage capturing glitches and bugs galore — that’s just wrong.
- AI partner getting stuck and having seizures against walls
- Story mechanics failing in freeplay (using same character to get a story-driven character out, and it just fails)
- Certain levels straight out not loading when entering the door
- Audio from films was EXTREMELY POOR in editing — hissing, too low, unclear
Sadly, these are just four of many, many more bugs running rampant in LEGO Jurassic World, and hinder a game that had as much potential as the great LEGO Indiana Jones and its sequel, to be a top LEGO game. However, it is clear that as time goes on, Traveller’s Tales feels the need to keep up with the big dogs, despite being on a completely different playing field.
It’s not all bad though — it was fun to play as some of the dinosaurs. Sometimes.
