[Multiplatform] Lego Indiana Jones - He no nuts, he's crazy!

Originally Posted by Muzza

Lego games, huh? Would somebody mind giving me a little rundown on these "Lego gamez"? I've seen screenshots and I've read reviews, but I'm still not sure what they're all about. Are they ripoffs or strokes of pure genius, in your humble opinions? (Tell ya what'd be perfect? If someone posted about Lego Star Wars in this thread. But beggars can't be choosers =/)

In LSW 1 and 2, you have a Story mode where you play through major parts of all three movies of each trilogy. The movies are each broken down into 6 chapters and you portrayed the characters vital to the particular scene. For example, in LSW2, Episode IV, Chapter III is Mos Eisley Spaceport and you have control of pre-Force Luke, Ben Kenobi, R2-D2 and C-3PO. Your primary goal is to reach the exit of the stage, but your most important goal is to find and collect hundreds of the little round Lego pieces called "studs". They come in three colors (silver, gold and blue in order of ascending value: 100, 500, 1000) and collecting as many as possible allows you to make purchases of unlocked characters and other beneficial items. Each chapter you clear unlocks more characters, but that's not the only thing you're collecting.

Clearing a chapter allows you to return to it in Free Play mode, in which you can play as any character you have purchased or acquired through clearing chapters. The benefit of this is you may not have had a Force-using character when you cleared it initially and now you can use the Force to perform a host of actions (moving things, hitting Force-activated toggles, using the Force to kill baddies, etc.). You can also only access certain rooms/areas after unlocking the door with a certain character (R2-D2, C-3PO, a bounty hunter or a Stormtrooper), and bounty hunters can destroy metallic objects with their thermal detonators.

Ultimately though you are trying to collect "kit" pieces (character-sized white electronic parts) that allow you to build vehicles for display outside the game's staging area outside the Mos Eisley Cantina, as well as gold bricks (which allow you to build some other special things in and around the Cantina) and red power bricks (which, once their particular power is purchased from the Cantina store, can supplement your characters in a variety of ways). The gameplay itself isn't all the difficult, though I will note that LSW2 doesn't seem to have quite as easy a combat system as LSW1. If you "die" (lose four hit points) you drop a bunch of studs (that you can recover if you're quick), which may hinder your quest to meet the stud goal for the particular chapter you're playing.

Currently I'm about 72% complete with LSW2. I still have three characters to unlock (the ghosts of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker and Yoda), I've yet to meet True Jedi status in a few chapters (meeting the stud expectation), and there are still some kits, gold bricks and power bricks for me to find. However, I have found the power bricks that add stud multipliers...now I just need to be able to afford them (the 2x multiplier is 2M studs, and I'm halfway there...but most levels average about 100,000 studs). I would say the cool part is that you can stack multipliers (there are five: 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10, which would give you a multiplier of 3840!!), but by the time I can use that sort of ridiculous multiplication I will likely be close to complete with the game and have no use for the store. But considering that E4C3 Free Play mode has up to 340,000 studs in it, it's possible to achieve 1,305,600,000 studs in one stage run (though I've read that the maximum amount of studs you can collect is 6M).

Overall, the two games are quite fun and I'm sure the next two Lego games (Indy and Batman) will be just as fun.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

For what it's worth, if you have a next-gen console Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga covers both trilogies and allows you to play as every character in both games, as opposed to in LSW2 where you could only play the LSW1 characters in LSW2 and not vice versa.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

BTW, that 6 million stud limit is lies. I would bet 6 billion would be more accurate.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.