On paper, LEGO Party ticks a lot of boxes. It’s new blood for a party game market plagued by patchy experiences. It has the perfect license for family-friendly laughs. There are loads of customization options. Crucially, for $40, it’s half the price of Super Mario Party Jamboree.
However, while LEGO Party respects the LEGO IP, it’s not as sympathetic to players, who will find plenty of issues with its 60 minigames, which are hamstrung by dodgy controls, will lose their spark after one go, or often rely entirely on luck. For every one of its strengths — and there are a lot of good ideas on show — LEGO Party doesn’t seal the deal and make itself a top competitor in a genre crying out for a solid 9/10 game.
LEGO Party is divided into four modes:
- Challenge Zone: Your classic board-game experience with zones and golden bricks to collect;
- Minigame Rush: Collections of themed minigames, e.g. sports, vehicles, last one standing;
- Minigames: Play any of the 60 games on the fly; and
- Score Chaser: Five linear minigames framed around beating your own high scores.
Its 60 minigames are split into 51 “free-for-alls”, i.e. classic deathmatches, while nine are team battles. It’s the Taskmaster format, complete with two game show presenters. Unlike the show, there’s a good chance these anchors will annoy you. They’re funny and annoying in equal measure, incessantly commentating while also making mistakes, like saying you’ve won two games in a row when you haven’t. They’re also particularly brutal to last-placed finishers, which I, for one, find delightful.
At first, LEGO Party seems like a classic Mario Party knock-off; its primary mode trades stars for golden bricks, and winning minigames earns you studs to spend on these as you encounter them. It’s very well balanced for younger or more inexperienced players, allowing you to give them a head start if necessary.
Still, as the games start rolling in, you quickly realize just how broken some of them are. It’s not for a lack of trying; we expect even the best party titles — like Mario Party and Jackbox — to make mistakes, be unbalanced (or simply unfair), or have poorly deployed ideas. Despite some brighter sparks, LEGO Party is undermined by bad execution.
Game time is pain time
LEGO Party offers a practice mode before each minigame, but even on a TV, it’s not always helpful — at least, on the Switch and Switch 2. By shrinking the screen size to accommodate instructions, it becomes slightly too small to understand what’s happening, and it looks rough, with next to no anti-aliasing and an inconsistent frame rate.
As you let the games begin, they fall into one of several categories: good fun, too short, a bit broken, skill-free, or entirely based on luck. There are a few fun variations on Mario Party classics that combine offense and defense, while others require simple levels of timing and planning, but these are few and far between.
Skill-free games are exposed by inaction. Tumble Time sees you free conical flasks from a maze for points, while trying to stop fiery balls from escaping. Turning the maze upside down and taking advantage of late-game spawns sees you win the game every time. Similarly, Brick Brigade, a firefighting game, usually results in a first-place finish if you stay in the same space for the final third.
A mercifully small fraction of games are outright unplayable — the rocket-based ones in particular. These take the Asteroids formula of combining direction and power, but apply punishing gravity and over-sensitive controls, making each game about luck and not skill, as you scrape around the screen. Similarly, the bungee-swing games require a serious investment to become even slightly adept.
Forgetting the main draw
Massive LEGO fans like me may feel that LEGO Party just doesn’t make the most of its strengths: the experience rarely focuses on construction, art, or just the fun of playing around with bricks.
It occasionally gets it right. Makin’ Monsters is a classic jigsaw-style drag-and-drop game with increasingly complex pieces placed into templates; Perfect Pillars is a straightforward stacking challenge where the only criticism is that it’s over too soon. However, the few other trials that focus squarely on LEGO’s original KSPs fall flat.
Read The Instructions — which makes you study a LEGO manual and choose which piece wasn’t used — quickly becomes “who can spot the glaringly wrong piece fastest.” Points are time-based, and questions are regularly recycled, while LEGO Party spaces the cursors across the same X axis as the selectable answers, giving players an unfair head start when choosing their guess. I know this sounds picky, but in the heat of the moment in a party game like this, it’s an excuse you know’ll be screamed by an unlucky loser, and rightly so.
Then there’s Arty Smarty, which immortalizes famous artworks in LEGO in charming ways (e.g., The Night Watch, The Milkmaid, and a real-life set, The Great Wave), but ultimately ends up being a dull quiz. One of the biggest laughs I had during my LEGO Party playthrough came when this minigame — which, let’s remember, is meant to be part of a family-oriented game — asked “Who created the Winged Victory of Samothrace?”
I know this sounds like a lot of nitpicking, but you only have to play LEGO Party in Minigame Rush mode for an hour to realize just how unbalanced the games are. Thankfully, the game’s core Challenge Zone format manages to minimize these faults with an enjoyable, competitive board-game mode, and the open vote for each minigame means you can usually avoid the truly bad ones.
Then there’s the madness of your AI competition. Easy bots are comical buffoons, while standard difficulty bots will quickly dominate — though pre-release patch notes say this issue will be fixed in the immediate term.
To its credit, LEGO Party is incredibly accessible, allowing for filtering based on reactions, memory, outside knowledge, and various control schemes. Given how understandably important these are to developer SMG Studio, this may be why certain games fall flat: designed to fit a type and working backwards, rather than an idea-first philosophy, though this is just a guess.
LEGO Party feels like the latest game that will shine with four human players for one or two playthroughs, only to be forgotten for a few months before a Christmas get-together rolls around, when everyone’s reminded of the same weird design choices, odd mechanics, frustrating timing issues, and sheer luck.
With some tweaks and an expansion or two to bring the minigame count closer to Mario Party, there’s a good chance this could become a must-buy experience. Until then, think twice before dropping $40 on LEGO Party — or at least wait until it’s on sale.
