The Lego Movie Videogame (PS4) review: everything is awesome when you’re part of a team!

The Lego Movie Videogame is the official videogame for the recently-debuted Lego Movie. Like most videogames created to accompany movies, it follows a very rigid storyline and can’t really stand on its own. But like all Lego videogames, Lego Movie is great, cathartic fun, and it can be forgiven on that basis for not being a fantastic game overall.

The premise of the Lego Movie, both as a film and a videogame, is that an evil overlord wants to destroy the Lego worlds our heroes know with a weapon of mass destruction, the Kragle. Of course, it’s up to the greatest, most talented, most interesting, and most important person (minifig) in the world to stop him, through use of the fabled Piece of Resistance.

Enter Emmett, the prophesied Special, who stumbles upon the Piece of Resistance and goes on the adventure of a lifetime.

Everything is awesome!

This game is great fun. Seriously. If you’ve never played a Lego videogame before, now might be the time. The Lego Movie Videogame isn’t the most well-written one if you haven’t watched the movie, for reasons I’ll explain below, but it gives you a pretty cathartic experience smashing up Lego bricks with wild abandon. And isn’t the best sort of videogame the one that gives you hours of fun?

Check out what I mean. There are a lot of movie cutscenes, but we weren’t able to record them natively via the PlayStation 4.

Everything is awesome! Visuals.

For the first time in the series, everything in the Lego Movie Videogame is made out of Lego parts. The trees, the flowers, even clouds of smoke and splashes of water are made out of Lego pieces, as are the trees, the buildings, and even the animals. If you grew up playing with Lego pieces, the nostalgia you’ll feel will be overwhelming. Prior to this game, I wasn’t aware it was emotionally possible to reminisce about a tree.

The actual game is presented in gorgeous high-definition, especially when played on the PlayStation 4, though cutscenes are projected in a surprisingly lower res. Compared to the polish of the actual movie, the Lego Movie Videogame’s cutscenes look like real Lego bricks were animated. The grittiness of the footage actually adds to the game’s atmosphere though; after all, isn’t everything in Brickburg and its surrounding worlds made out of…bricks?

Everything is not that awesome. Audio and plot.

One thing that wasn’t awesome about the game was its audio. Sound effects were stellar, of course. You could probably break Lego bricks up in-game for all eternity and not consider it hell. That’s how good the sound effects are. The actual voicing isn’t an issue either; the voice actors from the movie appear to have reprised their roles and they deliver their hilarious lines with great panache.

What truly sucks is the fact that nobody bothered to playtest the game for its audio before it shipped. The volume is inconsistent, and there are times where the sound effects get really soft, and times where they suddenly go berserk and inexplicably rise in volume. That’s not cool when Bad Cop is after you. Not cool at all.