LEGO Pirates Of The Caribbean

Everybody loves LEGO. From being a young child to rediscovering youth in adult life the sentiment remains. There is something about building those colourful bricks into something that resembles a miniature society that can only be described as fun. Videogames, for some, evoke the same emotions so it would only seem like a natural progression that the two may meet. This job was taken by Traveller’s Tales and have matched the two together with a spice from popular film franchises. The latest effort revolves around Disney’s seminal Pirates Of The Caribbean series.

LEGO Pirates Of The Caribbean is a retelling of all four of the Pirate movies with a comical LEGO spin. Starting with The Curse Of The Black Pearl the story follows the notorious outlaw: Captain Jack Sparrow, on the search for his beloved ship. From there he must plunge the depths of the high seas to heart of Davey Jones’ Locker and on to the Fountain of Youth. To aid Jack in his privateering, he must recruit just about everyone to contribute in some small way, even the prison guard’s dog.

The environments are superbly built and with High Definition visuals really stand out. Everything is made from LEGO, which can sometimes be forgotten, until something blows up at least. While running through the levels a jaunty soundtrack inspired by the films is always heard, this again is worked into the game to give that extra dimension of gameplay. As fans of the LEGO games will already know, the game’s inhabitants don’t speak, instead only use sound effects to portray what is really going on.

Up to 50 characters can be unlocked throughout the levels and many have different skills. These come in handy when replaying levels as items previously unobtainable or extra parts of the levels can now be accessed. What this creates is a game that is not only big to play through on the story mode but also has a lot of replay value when it comes to finding all of the collectables in the game.

Finding every single item to collect is a tough challenge as each of the game’s environments are large and open. Only certain points are loaded at a time so there is a short wait for each portion to be loaded, which can get annoying if there is a lot of running back and forth to solve a particular tedious puzzle. These happen to be few and far between but can still be annoying nether the less. The characters that appear in the game interact well with the environments are more of a comical nature than those of the films. They are beautifully crafted and produce genuine laugh out loud moments – the scene involving Elizabeth and Jack get drunk on rum springs stands out above the rest.

The combat used in the game is simple and most of the minions can be taken with ease. Although, not spending hours on the bosses, LEGO Pirates Of The Caribbean should have made the bigger enemies harder than they actually are. They only present a slightly increased challenge to the normal enemies.When not swashbuckling, LEGO Pirates Of The Caribbean is confronted with puzzles. Usually requiring to build or destroy something they are often not too challenging but there are a few that do tax the brain.

LEGO Pirates Of The Caribbean is a fun game to play and does last for an age. With a metric tonne of collectables there is a lot to go back to once the game has finished. The triad of Pirates, LEGO and video games works very well together, it provides an even more outrageous presentation the films on which the game is based. Characters such as Jack Sparrow, Balbosa and even Elizabeth Swan really shine with their comical attitudes to everything. If anyone has missed playing any of the Lego series then this one is one to try. Fans of the series may feel like this has been done before as there is not much innovation between the games, which is a shame because the game is a genuinely funny title.