Lego Party - Review

For the longest time, if you wanted to play a digital party game, Mario Party was your only option, more so if you didn’t want to play digital version of actual board games. While others tried early on with games like Crash Bash and Sonic Shuffle, Mario Party has had the board to itself for years, until now that is. Lego Party might be rolling the dice taking on the king, but there is good reason to be excited.

Now I was thinking of writing this review without making comparisons to Mario Party, but it is just not possible, they are so very much alike at times. There are a few key modes to enjoy there, you have your Challenge Zone, which is the main board game mode and then you have your mini-game challenges, more on those later. The entire game plays out as if you were taking part in a TV game show, so when you begin, your character even enters as if called onto the stage. Challenge Zone has four boards, Pirate, Ninjago, Space and Theme Park and each board varies in size. From here you can choose the number of rounds you want to play and then you are into the action, just like Mario Party, more rounds means more play time.

The theme, in a grand sense, really doesn’t matter too much, instead of Pirate booty, it becomes Space Pirate booty. Ok, that is not a fair example, but the boards all feature the same basics, reward spaces, punishment spaces and event spaces. Those latter ones are where you are going to find the unique aspects for each board. Now in Mario Party, all the players hit a dice at the start of the game in order to determine their position from the remainder of the game and that works. For Lego Party they changed things up in a way that honestly feels like the best evolution, the placements after each mini-game determine your position. Before the first player even gets to move on the board, you are thrown into a game, because the winner is the first person to move on the board.

But even that is not enough of a change, as with each mini-game you enter, there are chances to dictate what games you play. The game will offer up three by name and one random, so if you know the games you can tilt things in your favour. Because of the winner of the mini-game getting first chance to move on the board, sometimes the game is not just about winning, but making sure the person nearest to the Golden Brick, is not ahead of you. This honestly adds such a fun layer to the game, because unlike Mario Party and its gotta come first mindset, here it doesn’t matter if you don’t just as long as your rival places worse than you. Now outside of the mini-games, getting around the board is very similar to Mario Party, you just have to roll the dice, well in this case be award a number from a board and off you go.

What makes the boards so much fun to spend time on is not the event spaces, though I will admit becoming space cat poop was a riot, but rather it’s the commentators. This is perhaps the biggest strength of Lego Party compared to others, as your actions will often be spoken about. This happens in the mini-games as well, so its not a board exclusive thing, but due to you needing to focus in those mini-games, you might miss them. The hosts of this gameshow are Ted and Paige and both have some great lines and while I would love to tell you some, I honestly can’t remember any of them, as I often laughing at what was being said.

Oh, speaking of the mini-games there are some really amazing ones and a few stinkers, but most of them are just good fun. The stinkers really only impact the fun in the Challenge Zone, in the mini-game frenzy mode, where you can choose from existing playlists or create your own, you can just ignore the ones you don’t like. The two mini-games that irked me to no end, one had you swinging around like Spider-Man, but you needed to land on a platform and dance on it, it was just not fun. The other one was due to a thief stealing from me, the goal was simple, create a burger for an alien and just before the timer was about to end, a CPU controller player came and stole my burger top. When I was not being enraged by the CPU, I had a blast, there are a good number of racing type mini-games, even that is part Excitebike and part Trials. There were some great chaos games like mini-golf and some timing focused ones like jumping a Kraken.

Outside of Challenge Zone there are two other methods of play, the mini-game list and the challenges. The former is where all the games are located, from the moment you start the game, all are open to you. What is nice about this is that while the game has curated a selection of playlists, you can also create your own. The latter of the two modes is more for solo play, though you can take turns with friends and that is the challenge mode. Here it is about getting a high score or setting the best time, a real test of skill. The final aspect to the game is not a game mode, but rather a character mode. As you play through the Challenge Zone, you will earn overall XP and board XP. Level up your character and you get a new minifigure to play as, you will also earn carrots. Those can be used to buy new minifigures and apart from a few restrictions, you can interchange all aspects.

The best part about the minifigures, in fact the whole game, is that it looks like Lego. Everything is made from Lego, so much so that if you had the pieces, you could create everything yourself. The characters move like Lego, animals that dot the boards all have their Lego connection points, everything is just so tactile, that is how good it is. When you view the Ninjago board, everything looks like it was just taken out of the Ninjago show and while the others don’t have a tv show of their own, they still look exactly as you will remember the sets to be. While your character can change from game to game, Ted and Paige are locked into their looks, which helps keep a sense of consistency to everything. More so, because of their incredible voicework, there is a lot of life to them, the joy of Ted discovering something new or the frustration of Paige dealing with Ted’s enthusiasm.

I will point out, that while the developers have stated there are some 15,000 lines of dialogue for the game, I did hear them repeat more than a few lines. Now if I was playing a game on the Pirate board and then the next day played again and heard one or two lines the same, that would be fine. But that was not the case, here I heard the same lines on the same board, within the same game. It is not a frustrating thing, but just something that might become an issue if you play daily. Finally, the games music on the boards, in the tv station and in the mini-games, is vibrant and upbeat, ensuring that you are always ready to go.

Lego Party is the evolution to the videogame party series that we have needed for a long time. Mario Party has its pluses, but it has not been challenged and that has led to them playing safe, but Lego Party is going to give them a reason to try again. The idea of being able to influence who goes first, with the mini-game placements, is honestly such a great idea, because it adds a tactical layer to the fun. And fun is what you will have here, the mini-games are mostly wonderful and being able to curate lists of your own favourites is a great touch. If you love having folks around to play with, this should be added to your line up, because with this and the right group, you will have all you need for an amazing party.

The Score

9.0

Review code provided by Fictions

The Pros

The Challenge Zone mode is delightful and offers up a lot of things to enjoy, no matter how many visits you make

There are countless mini-games that are going to become favourites after just a few plays…

The Cons

…but on the flip side there are some that are irksome due to the AI or controls

Outside of minifigures to unlock, there really isn’t any real benefit for playing a lot