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Thanks Dinosaurs, You Finally Made Me Want a New Lego Video Game

By on March 17, 2015

The LEGO video games have never really struck a strong chord with me. I have no childhood nostalgia for the blocks, for one, but I’ve also never really viewed how TT Games used the Lego license as particularly fruitful or creative. They’ve always just been kid-friendly games doing their best to recreate great movie and comic book moments, and that’s nice, but diminishing the potential of the Legos themselves as building blocks for the developers, rather than the players, has been a bit of a sad compromise. That’s what you get, though, when Minecraft would be your primary competitor if you tried. Failure.

The one game I did buy, Lego City Undercover, benefited from no movie license and definitely suffered for it. Since then I’ve turned my back on the games, despite massive offerings on both the Marvel and DC sides of things. Then TT Games did the one thing I couldn’t ignore.

They got dinosaurs. These dinosaurs, to be exact:

Jurassic Park Brachiosaurus LEGO Jurassic World

Now I don’t care if I can’t build stuff. I don’t care if the games were made for toddlers with the dexterity of a drunk Gumby. I just want to play with the dinosaurs, and also relive all those glorious moments from the Jurassic Park films.

LEGO Jurassic World, to be released sometime in June for every mildly relevant video game system, will indeed cover the events of all four films in the franchise, notably including the as-yet-unreleased Jurassic World, starring The Guardians of the Galaxy’s Chris Pratt and his raptor pack. You might take note that Jurassic World is also due out in June. It’s like somebody planned it that way.

There is another reason LEGO Jurassic World excites me, and that reason has nothing to do with tiny arms. Telltale Games, the other company that confusingly has two Ts in its title before the word “games,” put out their own Jurassic Park game a couple years ago in the style of their narrative-focused bread and butter, The Walking Dead. Unfortunately, this time the bread was moldy and you really could believe it wasn’t butter, because the game was downright terrible. Ironically, Telltale failed in a way that TT Games rarely does, but Telltale tries so hard to do well.

TT Games’ greatest virtue isn’t actually its desire to publish a game under every intellectual property worth more than $100 million. The studio employs a deft comedic skill in presenting whatever movie is currently on the docket in the often kooky LEGO universe. They may have signed on for their greatest challenge, however, in the responsibility of transferring the genius of Jeff Goldblum into a state digestible to the children, the fear being they might just be too enlightened by the end of the game.

About Trevor Ruben

Though I contribute to many online publications on a regular basis, including The Checkout, the crux of my writing lies in video games. When not writing, I'm often streaming a variety of games on Twitch.