When you think of Lego games, chances are your brain will go straight to one of the licensed Traveller’s Tales games from the last 20 years or so. Whether it’s Star Wars, Batman or Indiana Jones, there’s no denying their joyful cycles of wild and wilful destruction, clackety building and reams upon reams of daft jokes over the years have come to define what we expect and want from any new licensed Lego adaptation. And I think it’s important to state up front that Lego Horizon Adventures, which retells the story of Sony’s Horizon Zero Dawn for a fresh and younger kind of audience, is not that kind of Lego game.
Lego Horizon Adventures reviewDeveloper: Guerrilla Games, Studio GoboPublisher: Sony Interactive EntertainmentPlatform: Played on PS5Availability: Out on 14th November on PC (Steam), PS5 and Nintendo Switch
To put it another way, if the Traveller’s Tales Lego games were about bulldozing recognisable film sets with a maniacal grin on your face, Lego Horizon Adventures is more like playing with perfectly glued down figure sets at a friend’s house that you’re almost too scared to touch in case they might break. It is, in effect (to pull from the game’s other main touch point) a bit like playing in Will Ferrell’s basement from The Lego Movie – and not just because its cast of characters move in that same, almost stop-motion kind of way during cutscenes, or have a similar tendency to talk a mile-a-minute in its overwritten and hyperactive script. Sure, you can trundle Aloy, Varl, Erend and Teersa along and pretend to go ‘pew pew!’ or ‘boom!’ as you play out mock battles either by yourself or with a friend, but for goodness’ sake, don’t anything will you?
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Of course, I’m acutely aware that I should be talking about Lego Horizon Adventures on its own merits, rather than simply lamenting how its dearth of good visual gags and shocking lack of destructible scene furniture don’t necessarily correlate to the template laid down by the work of an entirely different developer. But even if you put aside all previous notions of what Lego games can or should be, Lego Horizon Adventures still struggles to answer one fundamental question: who the heck is this game even for?