The Nintendo Basement – Your source for everything Wii, DS & Retro Nintendo

So when we went to Activision, we got to play a game we were very excited about -  Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventure. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for a couple of years, you would have heard of and most likely played the Lego Star Wars games released over the last few years, and this is a continuation of that series, however in the Indiana Jones universe.

If you’ve played the Lego Star Wars games, this game will be very familiar, however rather than just swap Star Wars for Indiana Jones, they’ve actually improved on and added more to the games. The first thing you’ll notice is that there’s more focus on puzzle solving than the previous games. There are also traps ahoy so you need to keep your eyes open especially wide this time around, and there’s also quite a lot of focus on exploration. While the manipulation of Lego blocks will be familiar, now characters also have items that can be picked up and discarded which are also needed to solve puzzles. Shovels are needed to dig up items and steer boats, wrenches can fix machinery, guns can be acquired off enemies, and last, but not least, you can even get a rocket launcher. This was just in the space of the first two levels of the game, so we imagine there are many more items to come. More inside.

There are also vehicles to use in levels now, plus animals to ride such as horses and camels.

The game structure is very similar to the earlier games, there is a central hub, in this case Marshall College, and from there you can access the three films with their own levels inside.

Many other things will be familiar to players of Lego Star Wars: a huge cast of characters, plenty of collectibles in every level and the same easy to access gameplay that allows anyone to get into it, but to finish it 100% takes dedication and skill.

Humour is something else that is still present and there are even some in-jokes with the original game which will elicit laughs.

As we only got to play the Wii version, we can confirm the controls are the Wii-mote and nunchuk combination. While most actions are through button press, there are a few actions which require waggle. What is well implemented though is Indy’s whip. Pressing the attack button causes him to whip out ahead. But whipping the Wii-mote causes the whip to lash out in the direction you whip it, which is not just more fun, but useful in game too.

The only problem we can see is that when in multi-player, everyone will want to use Indy. Even though the other characters have skills and abilities that are useful, no one is as cool as Indy. This wasn’t such a problem in the Star Wars games as almost every level featured two Jedi characters or Chewbacca so you very rarely were not happy with the character you had to use.

Overall though, it was a far more polished game than the Lego Star Wars games as it has been improved upon in all areas, and has enough new content to also appeal to the people who have played the other Lego titles to death.