LEGO The Incredibles

Rating: 6/10 😸😸😸😸😸😸 

Ages: all ages, although younger children and impatient adults might get frustrated by some of the fiddly mechanics

I'm a fan of Lego games, have been for years, but a lot of the more recent ones left me feeling meh about the whole Lego game thing. Too many of them were buggy and felt like re-treads of previous game mechanics. A lot of the game just didn't make sense and the stories were just straight re-tellings of the movies they were based on. The fun little easter eggs and character goofiness was missing.

I loved the Lego Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones, and Pirates of the Caribbean games. I enjoyed most of the earlier superhero ones and the Harry Potter ones, but the Hobbit was not fun. It included an unwinnable race and a lot of flaky programming. The Lego Movie game was too weird. The more recent superhero ones felt just off.

I bought Lego Jurassic Park (review coming soon!) on a whim when it was on sale cheap. And had a ball playing it. My daughter (18yo) decided to play with me for a while, but only if she could just play as a raptor. The whole time. This game was NOT play-tested for a raptor in EVERY situation. We crashed it multiple times. And laughed hysterically at the silliness of it.

Lego The Incredibles does not have dinosaurs, unfortunately. But it has superheroes with lots of superpowers. This is a good thing and also a bad thing. The good is that you can fly, shoot lasers out your eyes, swim underwater, throw fish bombs, slam the ground really hard, and a bunch of other things. The bad is that the powers are only labeled by an icon so it's hard to figure out what the powers are if it's not obvious. There is a way to find text titles for the powers but I was at over 80% of the game finished before my daughter found it. They are a bit overwhelming, too, trying to find the one character that has that one rare power that you  need in that one spot. The other bad is also a good, if you're an anarchist in these game like me, it's really easy to cheese a lot of the jumping puzzles with a flying superhero. Or a helicopter, which I found and stole in the first half hour of gameplay.

The game crashed a lot, too. I'm not sure why. We were just playing it. Maybe because the game felt like it was mostly programmed to be a one-person game with the second player added as an afterthought, although there were places where it was almost impossible to play as just one player. It was weirdly uneven in this regard.

By far, my biggest gripe about the game is the way the story levels are integrated. In the older games, the cut scenes usually came just at the beginning and end of the level with a short one maybe in the middle at the checkpoints. This one had the story/animated sequences so integrated into the play areas that it was really hard to figure out if I was actually playing or watching a movie. And some of them were SOOOOO LOOOOOONG. Seriously, I took a lot of bathroom breaks in the middle of playing levels because of this.

The story levels also took place in the overworld half the time, which was even more confusing than the long cut scenes. Sometimes you could go off and explore and do what you want and other times you were limited to the story characters and settings which were the same but not. Yep, so confusing to play.

A lot of the extra overworld prizes, like the gold bricks and building bricks, didn't become available until after you did the crime wave for that area. Which would not be that big of a problem, but the crime waves were tied to story levels so you don't get half these goodies until after the game is mostly finished. What's the point in giving me a special brick that has great superpowers that would have been very helpful early in the game after I've already done all the things it might have helped me do?

Money also has little meaning in this game except as a way to keep score. You only purchase a few things and they don't cost much. I remember scrounging coins like crazy in the earlier games so I could buy that one character I unlocked that I wanted to play SO MUCH, but this game? Meh, most of them you just get once you find them. No money necessary.

My other major complaint is the extremely long load times especially the ones where the screen goes black for almost a minute. I kept wondering if the game had crashed while loading the next scene.

Overall, it's been a fun game. The overworld is amazingly large. There are plenty of places to explore, hidden treasures to find, simple puzzles to solve but a lot fewer than previous Lego games, plus loads of fun characters including a lot from other Pixar movies. Would I have played full price for this? Probably not. But it was worth the ten bucks I dropped to get it.

I'm still missing the silliness from the previous Lego games, though.