Look, I have been playing Mario Party for a long time. Longer than nearly any other game series I keep up with. We all know the pain of stars being stolen or a poorly rolled dice block. Yet for some reason, even when Luigi wins by doing absolutely nothing, its particular brand of randomness has never really struck me as unfair.
Lego Party got dangerously close to that point when I got a full board in at Summer Game Fest.
We’ll circle back to that in a minute, but I have to open with some high praise too. The game goes all in on the Lego for pretty much every facet of its presentation. You’re collecting gold bricks and studs rather than stars and coins. Character selection presents a huge assortment of minifigures that you can then customize and mix and match to let your tastes shine through. You can even “add” to a board by “building” elements, giving you some control over a game’s events and adding on some nice replayability in a creative choice that deviates from its main inspiration.
Things change up in some other key ways as well. There isn’t a set turn order, for example. Rather, how you place in a minigame — played at the start of a round — determines that round’s turn order. This makes things a little more dynamic and can create some interesting scenarios. Imagine activating an event that’ll reward a player for getting to a certain space at the end of one round, winning the minigame that kicks off the next round, and now being able to “go again” to get yourself to that prize. It’s something that took a little getting used to, but the more I thought about it the more I wanted to explore its possibilities for subtle metagaming.
Lego Party is also pretty dang generous with its gold bricks. A ten turn game in Mario Party might lead to two to three stars being in players’ hands by the last turn (and not counting bonuses). Here we ended a six round game with at least eight gold bricks between us. An event happened at one point where a 2 v 2 minigame was played, with both winners getting gold bricks. Another event just dumped two of them onto random spaces, waiting for a player to land on them and pick them up for free. It’s a generous approach that runs the risk of letting a player snowball, but ideally it keeps the competition close while ensuring there aren’t any “dead turns.”
That does lead me to that established criticism though. It felt like there was just too much stuff going on in my game of Lego Party. Multiple turns where players picked up multiple gold bricks, events that took studs from every player indiscriminately, and an abundance of chance time spaces made things more random than I’d like in a game like this. Maybe that’s the point, and some people would probably be into that madcap approach, but it left me feeling frustrated more than thrilled.
I’m willing to give the game the benefit of the doubt, because what I saw wasn’t bad by any stretch. SMG Studio has done an exceptional job with the IP itself and it’s actively competing with a genre mainstay — something we don’t typically see with party games these days. If you’re a Lego fan that wants something outside of the usual licensed titles or just eager to give a different kind of party a try (albeit a lightheartedly chaotic one) then keep an eye out for Lego Party later this year on Nintendo Switch and other systems — no Switch 2 version announced at this time.
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Written by Ricky Berg
When he isn’t writing for Nintendo Wire, Ricky’s anticipating the next Kirby, Fire Emblem, or if the stars ever align, Mother 3 to be released. Till then he’ll have the warm comfort of Super Smash Bros. to keep him going.
