They've also toned down the difficulty since the PS2 version, although opinion is currently divided on whether that's a good thing or not. Personally, I like a game I can play. Others like a game that challenges them. Everyone in this house likes a game our youngest can play without constantly asking us to assist him through the tricky bits.
(As a side note, I once again stand by our decision to let our kids play video games from a young age, but that's perhaps an argument for another day.)
So we bought LEGO STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS for our shiny PS4, expecting great things. Or at least more of the same things.
And immediately we found problems. For starters, they've complicated the crap out of the controls. It used to be jump-hit-interact-force. Now we've got jump, hit, interact, force, climb, blow up, throw sabre, shoot, and a bunch of other stuff. Some of them, for example the throw-sabre move, gets used once during the training level then never explicitly used again (that I've seen). You've got grappling hooks to drag stuff around. You've got specific objects that can only be shot by certain characters. You have special binoculars that can highlight special areas.
None of this is necessarily a bad thing. Variety is good. But the Lego games thrived on simplicity. There were only rare moments when you got stuck because (for example) you were trying to force an item that could only be shot. The puzzles were clear enough to be solved but still involved enough to give you a sense of achievement when you completed them.
And then FORCE AWAKENS throws in some cover based shooting.
Seriously now, what's the point of this? If I wanted to crouch behind a chest high wall and pop out to shoot baddies, there are literally a hundred other titles I could play. Why bung it in here? Is it just that the designers wanted "variety" and cover based shooting was the first thing that appeared when they googled "stuff that goes in video games"?
Ditto the quick-time events. QTE always feels like lazy button pushing to me. It's not vastly challenging and it breaks the flow of the gameplay. And, going back to our uncoordinated five year old, it's tricky enough that I inevitably get the controller shoved into my hands to get past these sections.
Oh yeah, and one other change that FORCE AWAKENS has introduced - they've added voices.
This won't sound like a big deal to anyone who hasn't played the originals. But the originals were hilarious, and so much of that humour came from the lego dudes being silent and conveying everything with exasperated expressions and visual gags. So now we've got a bunch of dialogue from the movie, which makes everything more dramatic and less funny. Even the amusing lines aren't so amusing when being fed through little plastic people.
In fairness, this only really hampers the main missions of the game. For the first week I played it, the voices grated horribly, and all I could think was how much more fun it'd be without them. Now that I've got into the side-missions and bonus sections, where they've either recorded new dialogue snips or just ditched dialogue entirely, it's noticeably more enjoyable, and I've laughed out loud at a good few bits.
So my capsule review is: man, it's difficult to make a new game in a beloved franchise. If you leave it exactly the same, people will be all like, but we've paid for this game already wtf?, and if you make alterations they're like, why have you dicked about with a winning formula ffs?
Although, bonus points for having JJ Abrams as an unlockable character.
