LEGO Pirates Of The Caribbean Review

“Ther’ll be dangers along the way, firstly mermaids, zombies, Blackbeard…”

 

 

The LEGO’s are at it again with an action packed game that will keep your family entertained with our hero’s Jack Sparrow, William Turner and Elizabeth Swan from Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean. If you like the LEGO video game series, and you like this series then you will truly enjoy this game put out by Traveller’s Tales. I have to say that this has been their best work to date yet the foundation of the game still follows all of the previous titles. The game follows the all 4 movies in LEGO style and keeps the player entertained.

 

 

Each story has only five levels and each one tends to have a decently lengthy cut scene after the level as well. While these scenes are well made, it seems that you end up spending more time watching the characters act out scenes that happened in the movies but with a twist of humor than actually playing the game itself. Some of the humor is geared towards the older crowd to where the young ones may not get it but cute all the same. If you have played the previous LEGO games you will feel right at home with all the familiar mechanics of game play such as coin collecting, puzzles, etc. Complete the first level of the game, Curse of the Black Pearl and you’ll unlock the other three: Dead Man’s Chest, At World’s End, and On Stranger Tides.

 

 

 

The scenery and visuals within the game play and cut scenes have improved a bunch with a high level of detail. Character detail is still at it’s best. Each character has, in fact, a number of skills that will help to solve the many puzzles (just as past LEGO games you need a certain character to bypass something). Though the developers have at least introduced some nice innovations, such as using the compass of Jack Sparrow, there are quite a few items that can only be found with the compass. The addition of a character select wheel is extremely helpful, especially since there are 70 different characters to unlock throughout the entire game. If you’ve played any of the past LEGO titles, it’s great kids game, with a decent story and fun characters, but it’s also more of the same repetitiveness as the others.

 

 

Puzzles are more challenging than the other LEGO games, which can frustrate the younger crowd, but thankfully it has the Co-Op mode so anyone could just jump right in and play. Smart split screen has been seriously improved so that co-op play is more enjoyable when the players wander away from one another (over here at the office we are well known for doing that). I was bummed though that they didn’t include on-line Co-Op in this installment of the Lego Games. Hopefully the day that they make a LEGO Terminator series (one can dream), they’ll include that for all of our enjoyment. I believe that would make game play much more interesting because the split screen wouldn’t be happening.

 

 

Complete all 20 chapters and it will still be only around 50% completion of the game. Pirates of the Caribbean takes roughly 7 hours to complete unless you go back into Free Play mode to achieve 100%. I was disappointed with the shortness of all the levels. There are 40 achievements to unlock with a total of 1000 points, most are relatively easy to obtain such as complete Port Royal, use a spyglass, watch a sunset and my favorite…hit a flying parrot on Smuggler’s Den. A tough one is collecting all of the Red Hats in the game which cost studs (Red Hats unlock extras such as cheats for the game play) and Reach 888,888,888 studs, well, I guess that’s where the Red Hats can come in handy…Savvy?

 

Game 2 Gamer’s Final Score 3.5 / 5