Lego Pirates of the Caribbean
Aug. 7th, 2012 05:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroCAPTAIN Jack Sparrow gets into all sorts of trouble with the East India Company, Captain Barbosa, Davy Jones, Captain Blackbeard, and a kraken. And in the grand tradition of media tie-ins: It’s good because it’s made of Legos!
Good game for playing with non-gamers, because you can't really die and the jumping never gets too hard, especially where you can have one player get ahead and the other will automatically catch up. Tricky jumps or troublesome camera angles occasionally keep you from getting bonus items or 100% completion, but very rarely keep you from finishing a Story Mode level.
On that topic, though, the requirements for 100% completion annoyed me from time to time. Each level rewards a “gold brick” for finishing it, for collecting enough studs to reach “True Pirate”, for collecting all the items with Jack’s magic compass, and for collecting all of the ship-in-a-bottle minikits. You can always do the first two in Story Mode in a single run through the stage. You can never get all the minikits without going into Free Mode, because you’ll be missing characters necessary to get them. (Many of them can’t be reached until you beat the game and acquire Blackbeard as a playable character.) The compass items irritated me, because sometimes you can get them all and sometimes you can’t, and you don’t get a good indication of which is the case. There were a couple of instances where I wasted a lot of time determining that I couldn’t get the last item in that mode and would have to replay the stage to get it.
That said, there’s lots of replayability, given the volume of secrets to find and characters to acquire and use. You can get your “money’s worth” from the game just by playing every Story Mode and exploring the hub for secrets, or you could put 50 hours into hunting down every last minikit.
I prefer games like this and the Lego Star Wars games to ones like Lego Batman, because I think I like the large variety of characters better than the variety of powers for a single character or pair. I think that’s just a gameplay preference, though, and I suppose not having a crowd of character makes some kinds of areas easier.
One major issue we had: The game kept freezing on the final level or in the final battle. Apparently this is a common problem, according to the internet, and one without a common solution. It was deeply frustrating, especially since it was the final level. I finally got through it by playing solo and mostly rushing through—I suspect the size of the level and number of characters (especially with split-screen two-player) was at least part of the problem. Given that this is a PS3 game, I’m annoyed there isn’t a patch to fix this.
Plot-wise, this kinda makes me actually want to see the fourth movie so I could figure out what the hell was going on in some scenes. When I did remember the original scenes, the Lego versions, with no actual words and most of the violence cartoonified, were hilarious.
Overall: Cute. Easy. Fun for the whole family. I bought a copy of Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga for Jethrien and I to play together based on how much fun we had with this.
Good game for playing with non-gamers, because you can't really die and the jumping never gets too hard, especially where you can have one player get ahead and the other will automatically catch up. Tricky jumps or troublesome camera angles occasionally keep you from getting bonus items or 100% completion, but very rarely keep you from finishing a Story Mode level.
On that topic, though, the requirements for 100% completion annoyed me from time to time. Each level rewards a “gold brick” for finishing it, for collecting enough studs to reach “True Pirate”, for collecting all the items with Jack’s magic compass, and for collecting all of the ship-in-a-bottle minikits. You can always do the first two in Story Mode in a single run through the stage. You can never get all the minikits without going into Free Mode, because you’ll be missing characters necessary to get them. (Many of them can’t be reached until you beat the game and acquire Blackbeard as a playable character.) The compass items irritated me, because sometimes you can get them all and sometimes you can’t, and you don’t get a good indication of which is the case. There were a couple of instances where I wasted a lot of time determining that I couldn’t get the last item in that mode and would have to replay the stage to get it.
That said, there’s lots of replayability, given the volume of secrets to find and characters to acquire and use. You can get your “money’s worth” from the game just by playing every Story Mode and exploring the hub for secrets, or you could put 50 hours into hunting down every last minikit.
I prefer games like this and the Lego Star Wars games to ones like Lego Batman, because I think I like the large variety of characters better than the variety of powers for a single character or pair. I think that’s just a gameplay preference, though, and I suppose not having a crowd of character makes some kinds of areas easier.
One major issue we had: The game kept freezing on the final level or in the final battle. Apparently this is a common problem, according to the internet, and one without a common solution. It was deeply frustrating, especially since it was the final level. I finally got through it by playing solo and mostly rushing through—I suspect the size of the level and number of characters (especially with split-screen two-player) was at least part of the problem. Given that this is a PS3 game, I’m annoyed there isn’t a patch to fix this.
Plot-wise, this kinda makes me actually want to see the fourth movie so I could figure out what the hell was going on in some scenes. When I did remember the original scenes, the Lego versions, with no actual words and most of the violence cartoonified, were hilarious.
Overall: Cute. Easy. Fun for the whole family. I bought a copy of Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga for Jethrien and I to play together based on how much fun we had with this.
