Everyone knows it’s tough to make a film version of a video game, but I’d venture it’s also pretty difficult the other way around. You have to take a 90-minute movie with a three-act plot and stretch it into a 20-hour game without too much filler? Rather you than me. I remember Capcom’s Aladdin on the SNES – designed by a pre-Resident Evil Shinji Mikami – and its lengthy platforming sections set within Genie’s lamp that I’m pretty certain do not occur at any point within Disney canon. And if Mikami had enjoyed making that, I suspect, we would never have got Dino Crisis.
The Lego Movie 2 Video Game has a couple of answers to all that. Firstly, that each of the film’s locations is its own hub world – the Genie’s lamp of modern movie tie-ins. Starting in the Mad Max-inspired Apocalypseburg, you’ll follow the film’s story through each particular planet locale then be given free reign to explore much further, pick up side-quests spun off jokes from the movie script, mine Lego bricks for resources and hunt down collectibles. I got to go hands-on with this at an event this week, but if you’ve played Lego Dimensions – where each pack unlocked its own little hub bubble – you’ll know pretty well how it all works.
Like the bricks themselves, Lego video games have long used an amalgam of ideas laid down in slightly different configurations before – and so it is with The Lego Movie 2 Video Game’s other big feature, a sandbox style area to play around with and customise as you please. If it sounds inspired by TT Games’ Minecraft-alike Lego Worlds, then it is – although you won’t be painstakingly placing down items brick by brick.
Official LEGO Movie 2 Videogame Teaser Trailer Watch on YouTube
Without spoiling any of the movie’s plot, you’ll be given a hub of your own to gradually populate with buildings, characters and props found throughout the story. How you arrange and decorate this space is up to you, but you’ll also find an in-game shop there with more complicated builds to slot in, and redeem the now randomised character and item tokens you find hidden within levels. The area appears to offer a good deal of potential – robust enough to act as a bridge to Lego Worlds’ more complicated building, perhaps – although I wasn’t able to see how far you could take the area after completing the main game.