LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures Hands-on

May 7, 2008

Though it seemed like an odd couple when first announced, Traveller's Tales' LEGO Star Wars franchise quickly became a huge success due to its easy pick up and play mechanics and slick co-op play. Oh, and the Star Wars license didn't hurt one bit.

The crew is back with another LucasArts license, one that's about to be rejuvenated on the big screen come May 22nd. LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures is set to hit most every platform known to man on June 3rd, and aims to bring the same addictive gameplay seen in the Star Wars titles to Indy's journeys.

When you start up the game for the first time, you're immediately tossed into the classic opening sequence from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Running through the jungle, traversing the ruins and its many traps and running from the boulder is all here and serves as your tutorial for future play. A number of new mechanics not seen in the previous titles become immediately apparent here, and helps set the experience apart from the Star Wars games a bit.

The first major change is that while character classes each have their own abilities, some characters also come with an item that you can use, like a wrench, shovel, translation book or something of this sort. The cool thing is that many of these items are also available in the levels, giving any character the ability to wield a shovel or torch, for example.

Item uses are important to solving many of the game's puzzles, which are aplenty. Thus far, LEGO Indiana Jones feels more like an adventure game than the action-packed romps found in the LEGO Star Wars titles, though that doesn't mean that action isn't to be found. Rather though, after dealing with any foes in an area, you'll usually have to find some pieces of a broken item and move them over to fix said object or something along these lines.

When you do get your hands tied up in a bit of combat, you'll quickly realize that this is largely a hand-to-hand melee combat game. While you're able to pick up guns or other weapons from fallen foes, most of the time you'll be throwing fisticuffs at folks' grills to take them down. Since you usually can't attack from afar, when an armed group of enemies come at you, you'll need to hop around and close in quickly to keep gunfire from tearing holes in your clothes. When you do manage to pick up a gun, you're only allowed a handful of shots before it disappears, resituating the focus back on hand-to-hand combat.

As we mentioned, characters and classes of characters each have their own abilities (women can jump higher than men, for instance), but some also have fears that limit what they can do in certain situations. For example, (we named the dog) Indiana is afraid of snakes, so if you try and go near them he'll cower in fear. Likewise, Willie is afraid of spiders, making her somewhat useless around them. In these cases, you need to swap to another character (or have your co-op partner step in) and quickly clear the path for you. These situations haven't happened too often so far and are quickly overcome, fortunately, though they're abound enough to help give the characters a bit more personality. We'll see how this plays out throughout the entirety of the game, but it's definitely been an interesting twist so far.

One of the great things about the LEGO Star Wars titles was how much content there was to earn and unlock, and Traveller's Tales looks to have kept much of this in place here. Each level contains 10 treasure chests for you to find and collect, which then builds a statue or artifact of some sort. Power bricks take the form of parcels this time around. When you find one in a level, you also need to find a nearby mailbox to ship them back home with. These two look to always be within a short distance of each other as changing rooms will remove the parcel from your hands. However, the parcels are big and heavy, so you'll want to clear the area of enemies before hauling it off to the mailbox.

After mailing the parcel, it'll then show up at Barnett College, which acts as the game's overall hub. The college works almost exactly like the cantina did in the Star Wars games, though unfortunately you aren't able to start a "bar fight" with everyone in the area. Still, the design here is great and you'll find plenty of stuff to explore. The mail room has parcels for you to pick up (read: buy), the classroom has a chalkboard for you to enter cheat codes, the library lets you buy characters, and an artifact room lets you look at the pieces you've collected. There's a lot more here to explore than I've mentioned, and the overall presentation is great.

As you'd expect, you can play through any of the three original films in any order that you'd like. You have to play through each film chronologically, of course, but if you want to start with Search for the Holy Grail, you can do so. Each "movie" has six chapters, with some of them stretching into fairly lengthy segments. For instance, in the Temple of Doom, one chapter has you go from the village into Pankot Palace and down into the underground temple, all the while solving puzzles and killing guards.

A few, small liberties have had to be taken with actual film events to keep the co-op option in-tact. For example, at the start of Raiders, Alfred Molina trades Indy the golden idol for the whip, but then drops the whip and runs off leaving Indy to fend for himself. In the game, he sticks with Indy the whole time, including the boulder chase, and winds up defecting in a cutscene at the end, enabling a second player to be there the whole time.

One interesting thing that we haven't seen a lot of yet is how the game handles some of the more grotesque (and by grotesque we mean awesome) scenes from the films. For example, we haven't made it to the face melting sequence at the end of Raiders yet, but things like when Toht grabs the burning medallion and burns its form into his hand is played out comically. So, hopefully faces still melt.

So far, LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures is a good deal of fun. It certainly has a different feel than LEGO Star Wars as much of the gameplay is centered more around the adventure elements, at least so far, but fans of the other games will still feel right at home. The game is set to ship on June 3rd.