Indy, Short Round, and Willie escape the Temple of Doom. No time for love, Dr. Jones!

Lego Indy packs co-op fun, cute silliness, and occasional frustration. Legos and Indiana Jones are two great tastes that—fortunately—taste great together. If the rousing trumpet theme from John Williams’ classic score leapt to mind as soon as you saw the screenshots on these pages, you really ought to play this game.

Developed by Traveller’s Tales, Lego Indiana Jones was first published by LucasArts for the consoles (PS2, PS33, Xbox 360, and Wii) and handhelds (DS and PSP) in the summer of 2008. Feral Interactive’s faithful port for Intel Macs (except the Mac mini) lets you play with the keyboard if you’re a glutton for punishment, but we found that using a gamepad with analog control sticks gave virtually the same experience as playing on a console.

And it’s a fun experience—the detailed, animated Lego characters couldn’t be cuter, down to the tiny stubble on Indiana Jones’ face. The humorous cutscenes retell the stories in a tongue-in-cheek and family-friendly manner—no blood, no Nazis, no faces melting off, and no still-beating hearts pulled from chests by witch doctors. However, you can’t save your progress midlevel (you must complete a level to move on, although you get unlimited lives), and if you quit a level and retry it later, you’re stuck watching all of its cutscenes again—no skipping allowed. 

Instead of being shot by Nazis toward the end of the Last Crusade, Henry is “disassembled” by “enemies.”

When playing alone, you control multiple characters throughout the 3D environments, switching between them with a button-press. Sometimes two characters need to work together—say, Indiana stands on a platform while Marion turns a crank to raise him into the air. The cool thing is, another human player can join in (or quit) at anytime, even right in the middle of a level. Since two heads are better than one, co-op mode might help you solve some of the trickier puzzles too (search Google for “Lego Indiana Jones walkthrough” if you keep getting stuck). You fight enemies with punches, your trusty whip, or projectiles or guns. Occasionally you’ll need to pilot a vehicle, and the steering leaves a lot to be desired, but luckily those sequences are short.

Playing through everything in Story mode took us about 10 hours, but we’d still only unlocked 53 percent of the game, since a lot of treasures and special items can’t be reached with the characters you have available. For example, Short Round can crawl through hatches, but you only have him in the Temple of Doom levels. Still, the Raiders of the Lost Ark levels are silly with hatches. To complete everything, you’d have to go back and replay all the missions in Free Play mode, where you can use whatever characters you like.

Building a car out of—what else? Legos.

Between missions, head back to Barnett College, Indy’s home base, where you can view your progress, check out the artifacts you’ve collected, enter secret codes in the classroom, purchase additional characters or abilities with the coins you collected in the levels, and even solve a few puzzles. The game doesn’t give you a lot of information about what to do with your coins, how to unlock special powers or complete artifacts, or even why you’d want to.

The lack of midlevel saves caused us some frustration when we ran into very hard puzzles or seemingly impossible jumps—over the course of 18 levels, we had about 5 or 6 instances of wanting to chuck our MacBook out the window. You only get limited control over the camera view, and at times the controls can be wonky when one button has multiple functions based on context (we’d press 4 on our controller to jump into a vehicle, for example, and wind up switching characters, that button’s other task). Occasionally the video would stutter or freeze, but not very often, and we were generally able to “unstick” a frozen screen by jiggling the controller’s analog sticks.