Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures

If you’ve played Lego Star Wars, then you’ve played this game. More specifically, if you’ve played Lego Star Wars, you’ve played a better version of this game.

That’s not to belittle Indy, you understand. It’s just that the Star Wars universe had a lot more scope for a game based on swapping between different characters with different abilities simply since it had all those aliens and robots and Jedi and so forth, rather than archaeologists, dames, cult members and Nazis. For example, in the previous game it made sense that some characters could leap unnaturally high since they were Jedi with powers. Making an arbitrary decision that women can jump higher than men has obvious advantages for this game, but makes little sense in the Indiana Jones universe (unless I missed a scene in Raiders Of The Lost Ark where Marion cleared a barn from a standing start). Also, Indy’s whip is nowhere near as effective a weapon as a lightsaber.

Like its predecessor you play through three six-level games, each based on one of the pre-Crystal Skull films. You build things, collect things, smash up Lego stuff and rebuild it to make ladders and machines and so forth, with a couple of new tweaks (this time around you can grab weapons and hats from fallen foes, which is a nice touch but at times maddeningly difficult to actually do). It’s not like it’s unpleasant to play, and no sooner had I accumulated enough characters than I rushed back to the early levels to get my True Adventurer bonuses; but then again, you could always just go back to Tatooine.

Available on Nintendo Wii, $98