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Lego Pirates of the Caribbean: The Video Game (DS)

Status: Stopped playing - Something better came along
I started playing this game on Monday 1 January, 2024  //  I stopped playing this game on: Sunday 7 January, 2024
Current opinion of this game
No comment, yet.

January 2, 2024 05:56:56 PM
I keep on coming back to these!

It's impressive how the games are all essentially the same - there's a list of abilities that each result in a special interaction you can do in some part of a level, each character has (at best) one of these abilities. And the rest is basic/simple combat, exploration, building things, and breaking stuff for studs. The exploration is mostly interesting when you're on free-play, because each game's level is stuffed with collectibles.

I must have played 2-3 hours, finished 10% of the game (according to the in-game tracker), which was basically four levels that equated with the first movie. This was a surprise! The game has all four movies! Which is...a lot. Also, each level has a bunch of animated cut-scenes (Lego humorous recreations of parts of the movie). I'd assume that the animated scenes were all made for the higher-end versions of the game (PS3?) and then downscaled for the DS. And, this is still super impressive! I was only annoyed I couldn't skip them.

As for "unique"(?) to this game - the only gameplay I think is unique is that there are "duels" against certain characters (these are all pre-determined at set times in the game) - each duel has two steps. First is a button mashing to build up a meter and then 3 quick time button presses. Do this twice (or, from what I played, at most three times), and the duel is won. Nothing terribly special, but...it's a little something in a series of games that are almost their own genre at this point (because of how many games they made).

And yes, here I am playing one again (I won't continue after this) and, I continue to be amazed/surprised by how compelling it STILL is to break something in the game, have it explode into studs, and then proceed to hoover them up. I can't even blame "I wanted the trophy" here - because there's no such thing on the DS.

I did go back and play the first level on free play, found almost everything (there was one "ship in bottle" I couldn't get because I wasn't able to figure out which character could use their ability to let me reach where I needed to go, I thought it might have been a bug?). And wow, the free play version is a lot more expansive than I imagined. Significantly!

I wonder if the DS levels are smaller/truncated versions of the other console versions?


 
kudos for original design to Rodrigo Barria