Game Review: Lego Pirates of the Caribbean
Billy O'Keefe - Mclatchy -Tribune News Service
May 13, 2011
Reviewed for: Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. Also available for: Wii, Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo DS, PSP and Windows PC
From: TT Games/Disney Interactive
ESRB Rating: Everyone 10-plus (cartoon violence, comic mischief)
Price: $30-$50
If you're at all familiar by now with the Lego games, you know precisely how "Lego Pirates of the Caribbean" goes.
Whether that's a good thing or not is, of course, up to you.
Even by the standards of recent Lego games, "Pirates" feels married to a formula that charmed everyone in 2005's "Lego Star Wars" but has evolved at a glacial pace ever since. The game divides itself into four mini-campaigns based on the four "Pirates" movies - including the upcoming "On Stranger Tides" - and the extreme majority of these levels finds players controlling Lego-fied versions of the films' most popular characters as they reenact the most memorable scenes from each movie.
This has been the case with every console "Lego" game. But the Lego-fied heroes and villains of "Lego Batman" at least had cool gadgets to play with, while "Star Wars" and "Lego Harry Potter" had a wide complement of vehicles and spells, respectively, to diversify the action a little bit.
"Pirates" trots out a few new tricks. You can occasionally fire a cannon in first-person mode, solve puzzles using Jack Sparrow's versatile compass, and sometimes control a whole party of characters instead of the usual twosome. "Pirates" also is the prettiest Lego game yet, with levels that take place both above and below sea level and in front of the kind of picturesque vistas rarely seen in these worlds.
But the vast majority of "Pirates" is the same gameplay - light platforming, light combat and cause-and-effect puzzles that are a weird mix of illogical and overly easy - that has defined these games for six years now. Things that could've used improvement in 2005 - the awkward fixed camera, imprecise jumping controls, combat undermined by loose collision detection, the lack of online co-op support - remain in need of improvement, and the aforementioned additions are neither significant nor pervasive enough to mix things up the way "Batman's" and "Potter's" diversions did. If you came here hoping for anything beyond more of the same, you're even more out of luck than usual.
At least the cutscenes remain funny. In fact, if you like the idea of the "Pirates" movies more the drawn-out, rambling movies themselves, this might be the gateway you've been waiting for.
The Lego games, for all the routines they follow, are consistently brilliant in the art of converting its source material into funny cutscenes powered completely by body language, pantomiming and genuinely amusing slapstick. "Pirates" has less iconic material to work with than previous Lego games did, and because the "Pirates" movies are already campier than the likes of "Potter" and "Star Wars," there's less of an opportunity to take a completely serious scene and find a way to mine it for laughs.
But the more restrictive parameters don't keep TT Games from working its storytelling magic, and the result - funny, easy to follow and rarely bogged down in directionless blather the way the movies are - is entirely palatable whether you love the movies or have never even seen them.
----
----
Sound Off...What do you think? Join the discussion
Copyright 2011 by Mclatchy -Tribune News Service
