Gideon’s Perspective
Let’s get it out of the way now. LEGO Party is Mario Party with a LEGO skin. That fact means that it lacks the charm of recognizable characters and can’t pull content from a legacy dating back before I was born.
You can find a video version of this review on YouTube.
On the other hand, LEGO Party is playable without owning a console by an uncompromising, creatively bankrupt, litigious company kept afloat by nostalgia-driven folks trying to relive a happier time. So I have to give it a point in its favor for that alone.
In case it wasn’t obvious, I’m not a big fan of Nintendo, or at least present-day Nintendo. I am, however, a big fan of Mario Party, or at least the ones I grew up with. Despite the rather simplistic concept, until now, the genre has been pretty exclusive to Nintendo consoles.
A few games have tried to put their own spin on that style of party game, but they often miss the point of why Mario Party worked so well. They often forgo the board game aspects, when it’s how the board game system and the minigames interact that make the whole package shine.
LEGO Party doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel. It tackles what works, swirls in its own flavor, and it’s a stronger game for it. Innovation is great, but sometimes you don’t need to fix what isn’t broken. LEGO Party isn’t perfect, but it’s got its blocks built in all the right places, making it a respectable alternative to Mario Party.
| Gideon’s Bias | LEGO Party Information |
|---|---|
| Review Copy Used: No | Publisher: Fictions |
| Hours Played: 16+ | Type: Full Game |
| Reviewed On: Xbox Series X | Platforms: PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series, PlayStation 4/5, Switch |
| Fan of Genre: Yes | Genre: Party Game |
| Mode Played: Hard | $39.99 |
Block & Board
The concept of LEGO Party is a familiar one. You compete with three other players moving around the board, collecting studs, and buying golden bricks with those studs. Whoever has the most golden bricks at the end of the game wins. However, each round is punctuated by 1 of 60 minigames, where you can win studs, and placement in those mini games also dictates the turn order for the next round.
LEGO Party features 4 boards to play on, each with its own quirks and special mechanics. The Pirate map will have you attempting to take shortcuts via an unreliable Kraken. In NinjaGO you have to avoid dragon strikes, you will teleport around and fight an alien behemoth in the Space Map, and take part in a variety of stud-earning micro games in the Amusement Park.
LEGO Party also puts a slight twist on these maps by having various build zones. The first player to reach one of these spaces gets to choose between two new map features to build. It adds a bit of extra variety to the maps, which is nice.
Getting around the board has you rolling a…well, it’s not a dice, it’s more like a…number slide? You can roll between 1 and 8, but you can use various power-ups to alter the slide. Most spaces you can land on either give you studs or take them away, but some spaces allow you to buy items, steal from your opponents, or trigger some map-specific effect.
The map boards are pretty well designed and are full of individual quirks that make them interesting to play on. That said, I wish the power-ups were a bit more interesting. Most of them just alter your roll or teleport you to a specific space. They are useful, but a little drab.
The boards capture all the ups and downs you would expect. The cheers when getting a free golden brick and the groans when a chance space decided you were giving one to someone else. The branching paths and buildable sections also lend a decent amount of strategy as you decide where you want to land or go.
Do you try to take a dangerous path toward a free golden brick or play it safe? Do you want to land on a brick battle space that pits two teams against each other in a mini game that awards golden bricks? You have some agency in the way things play out, and I like that.
One thing I could do without, however, is the constant commentary. Two anchors report on the competition and constantly comment on events, and I do mean constantly. I would have muted them altogether if it weren’t for the fact that they do say some useful things every now and again, but mostly I found the dialogue to be obnoxious and distracting.
When it comes to your player character, you can pick from preset LEGO people or mix and match your own style. The key point I want to hit on here is that there are a ton, I mean a ton of unlockable costumes that you get just by playing the game.
It felt like I had stepped into a time machine and was transported back when every cosmetic a game offered wasn’t acquired with a credit card. LEGO Party may not have the charm of beloved childhood characters, but it certainly has cosmetic variety, and that variety simply comes with the game you paid for, something that is incredibly rare these days.
I’m not without complaint, however. You see, LEGO Party loves to absolutely shower you in studs while you play. Studs, as in the LEGO currency, not attractive men or ready-to-breed horses. The game does this no matter how poorly you might be doing. This can make the entire game feel somewhat unbalanced and arbitrary.
I don’t expect any party game to be the epitome of balance. But if I only win 1 out of the 20 mini games we played, I do expect to lose. Well, in one such game, I had only won a single mini game, and yet I won the overall game by having the most golden bricks. In another game, my partner did the same exact thing.
It does mean that you always have a chance to make a comeback, but it can also make the mini games feel pointless. Hopefully, that’s something that ends up tweaked post-launch.
Mini Gaming
LEGO Party features 60 minigames, the vast majority of which are 4-player free-for-alls, but a handful of them pit players against each other in 2 vs 2 teamplay. The minigames fall a bit more on the simple side than I would like, but most of them are pretty fun. There’s a solid variety of them.
Some have you counting cars that drive by, others have you pressing button combinations the fastest, balancing on a unicycle, or playing a simultaneous game of match 2. There are a couple of stinkers, but most of them bring the joyful chaos you would expect and want out of a party game. Best of all, none of them feature gimmicky motion controls that make you shake your arm like you’re having an incredibly vigorous wank, so that’s a plus!
While the mini games are simple, they are still skill-based mini games, and as far as I can recall, none of them dictated a winner out of pure chance, which I appreciate.
Something worth pointing out is that while you can play local or online multiplayer and LEGO Party features cross-play, you can also substitute real players for computer-controlled ones. The impressive thing about them is that they aren’t tacked on. If you turn their difficulty up to hard, they provide a real challenge and can definitely keep up with players, both in minigames and on the board.
That’s a very nice feature to have if you want to play solo or at any player count lower than 4. I definitely expected the bots to be brain-dead, but they play very well, sometimes too well, in some of the mini games, but that’s a trade-off I’m willing to take.
Verdict
LEGO Party is a safe mimicry of the genre popularized by Mario Party, but that’s the exact type of game that non-Nintendo platforms have never seen and desperately needed. While it can’t match the charm of the inspiration it brazenly wears on sleeves, it’s still a respectable party game that actually manages to pin down most of the things that make Mario Party a hit in the first place, all while charging less to boot!
The boards you play on are interesting, the array of mini games is solid, the computer players are competent when you turn up the difficulty, and you have a massive variety of cosmetics to mess with, all unlockable in-game.
The way that LEGO Party showers everyone in studs does undermine the importance of mini games to a degree, but it’s still a fun party experience that’s worth playing with friends or even solo.
