LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures (Wii) Review

If you're unfamiliar with how LEGO works in videogame form, it is pretty simple. Take a well known movie franchise, shove in lots of bricks and amusing cut-scenes, create lots of puzzles and throw in loads of unlockable characters and secret items. What it creates is one of the most enjoyable, amusing and solidly made franchises in the world of videogames.

We loved the LEGO Star Wars adventures, so we've been eagerly anticipating their efforts to LEGO-ify the world of Indiana Jones, one of the most recognisable movie franchises in the world. Thankfully then, this game offers everything the Star Wars original offered, which can only be good news, but alas does little to expand upon it, especially on the Wii. Whilst the gameplay is always solid and playing through the first three movies is great fun, the (almost) total lack of innovation in controls on the Wii really lets this title down. Simply hammering your wrists up and down to attack enemies does not constitute good use of the Wii hardware. As it stands, this is a good GameCube game on the Wii, which is a bit of a shame.

Our only other major gripe with this game is the camera. The stubborn bugger will have you committing suicide (or is it MURDER?!) over and over again. It tries to pan out to fit all the characters on screen at once, this doesn't work. You'll go jumping for a ledge, the camera won't follow you, you'll fall into the abyss and lose some of your precious lugnuts. At times it also decides to give you angles that make it almost impossible to judge distance and aim from. It can get a little frustrating from time to time to say the least.

Minor moans aside, if you loved the Star Wars series then chances are you'll love this. The same tongue-in-cheek humour is present along with the interesting LEGO interpretation of the storylines from the movies. The game gives you all the fun of the 1981 classic Raiders of the Lost Ark, the pretty rank and forgettable Temple of Doom from 1984 and the magnificent return to form that was 1989's Last Crusade. Thankfully the game is fun from start to finish, so even Temple of Doom can't ruin the fun.

The aim of the game is pretty easy to get to grips with. Play it. All the puzzles are pretty self-explanatory and whilst some of them might be a bit obscure or even downright ludicrous, they all seem to follow similar patterns. Build stuff, move stuff, whip stuff, hit stuff. It is this simplicity and child-friendly playability that make LEGO Indiana Jones good fun for anyone. The humour and sheer joy of being able to destroy everything to harvest the oh so precious little LEGO nuts (we dub them 'lugnuts' and you should too) is perhaps one of the most addictive elements to any adventure/platformer ever. Never before has our urge to destroy every single piece of scenery been so high. The point of lugnuts? Simple, the more you collect the more you have to spend in the shop and the more archaeologist-tastic things you can buy...like disguises, new characters and oh so very much more.

Both graphically and in terms of ear-related joy LEGO Indiana Jones ticks the boxes pretty well. Whilst there's only so much you can do with blocks (we'll avoid making the 'blocky visuals' joke at this point), all the colours and the animation and the cut-scenes are pretty damn good. Even the water effects are nice and swanky. In general we'd have to say that the style of this game is top notch, and you can't ask for more than that. This game really excels in the sound department however, with the classic soundtracks from the movies recreated in all their splendour. It's like someone came along and jammed a tiny little bit of that cinema into your Wii disk drive.

This game is, undoubtedly, at its very best in cooperative mode. You and a friend get to work your way through the whole game without the need for the fairly stupid computer AI coming along and messing things up. With the whole experience split up into relatively small chapters too it allows for easy pick-up and play fun. When you've completed the game you unlock all the levels to be playable in free-play mode, which allows you to go back and play thorough levels with any characters you like. This opens up new puzzles and areas with the characters' differing abilities; female characters can jump very high and smaller characters can fit through small gaps, for example. Sounds simple, but trust us, you'll be coming back for more.

Whilst this offering doesn't change much from the Star Wars LEGO titles, it doesn't mess anything up either. The levels are enjoyable, the puzzles have been improved upon and pleasingly the use of vehicles is still a prominent element. The basic mechanic of only certain characters being able to do certain things still works really well and the level design is perhaps even better than it was on the Star Wars series.