Whether you’re a fan of Pixar’s latest summer blockbuster or the popular action-adventure brick building genre, LEGO The Incredibles is a great entry in a beloved series of games that is sure to please. With both a story mode for the first Incredibles and Incredibles 2, as well as a large open world to explore, LEGO The Incredibles offers tons of value that can be enjoyed solo or with a friend. My ten hours spent with the game were filled with moments of laughter and glee. This is honestly one of the best LEGO games I’ve played to date.
Beginning with visuals, LEGO The Incredibles looks good, not great, although I can’t help but feel like that was due in-part to my opting to play on the Nintendo Switch. Characters and animations look great, but environments lack detail and I experienced both framerate chug and texture pop-ins during cutscenes. Nothing that soured my experience with the game, but I certainly felt like the game was lacking something in the visuals department. Environments are as visually varied as they are in the movies, and the open world portion offers new environments that the main story missions don’t include.
The less than impressive visuals could also be associated with poor optimization, as the game’s load times are horrendous. At times I spent well over a minute waiting for the next level to load which is strangely uncommon for smaller size games like this these days. Perhaps load times are better on other consoles, and future patches could address the issue, but at the time of this review the game has a rough time getting players right into the action.
The game sounds pretty good. Some music is lifted from the movie soundtracks, and everything sounds balanced and fits well with the game. One thing I can’t praise enough is the character dialogue. Ever since the LEGO games began using lifted dialogue audio from the respective films fans have been divided. However, in LEGO The Incredibles the movie audio is perfectly suited for the game, and feels as if it was recorded specifically for the game. If I wasn’t already familiar with the two Incredibles movies, I probably would not even be able to tell that the dialogue wasn’t recorded specifically for this game. Additional dialogue from both main and background characters also blends well with the game, and really adds another level of humor to an already funny game. There were many instances where characters would randomly say something funny that helped keep the experience fresh and interesting.
The game is split into twelve levels with the first six covering the events of Incredibles 2 and the other six covering the first Incredibles. The stories are pretty well adapted to fit the tropes of a video game, and make interesting story changes to account for co-op gameplay. For example, throughout many of the first Incredibles levels where the movie focuses mainly on Mr. Incredible, players get to join in as Frozone or other characters that the movies don’t focus on to add more variety in puzzle solving, as well as to make the game perfect for drop-in, drop-out multiplayer. Not only does this make gameplay more varied and accessible, but it adds some unique flare to the story that I found welcoming as a player that was already familiar with the story beats of the movies.
One gripe I did have regarding the levels were that while each level from the Incredibles 2 portion of the game felt varied and fresh, the original Incredibles half of the story mode felt like in terms of mission variety it followed a similar pattern. I still had fun from start to finish, but the Incredibles 2 half felt notably more original. Of course, this could be in part due to the fact that Incredibles 2 is a newer and more unfamiliar story.
Every character has special abilities used for puzzle solving, making teamwork crucial. Levels are full of alternate routes that can only be accessed by additional characters that can be unlocked later, leaving tons of replay value to each level. Puzzle solving is about as straight-forward as it is in any other LEGO game, but I found a lot of puzzles to be interesting despite this. Each character has a special attack that can be activated once charged, which keeps the simple combat fresh, as it’s always exciting to see what abilities each character is capable of. With 119 playable characters in total, there are plenty new combat styles to discover.
Speaking of unlockables, LEGO The Incredibles is full of goodies to unlock and add to your collection. Aside from the aforementioned 119 characters there are also cheats, vehicles, building pieces, and much more to unlock. The open world aspect of the game is sprawling by LEGO game standards, and the map is filled with places to explore and things to unlock. Perhaps the most notable unlockables are the various non Incredibles Pixar characters. Characters from all your favorite Pixar movies like Finding Dory and Cars are not only in the game, but playable too, adding tons of added fun for Pixar fans.
The open world portion is also a great place to experience original story content outside of the game’s standard twelve missions. Throughout the hub world players can discover new parts of the map that open event style side quests. Objectives range from stopping mimes from bombing the city, to restoring peace to the city’s local ice cream industry. It’s plain old dumb fun that keeps the world of The Incredibles alive well after the main story is over. After each event mission is complete, a new portion of the map is restored to its original state, and the area becomes free to explore in search of more collectables and unlockables. I really appreciated how this method of introducing parts of the world and side missions eased me into the post-game content rather than just throwing me in. It made comprehending the large amount of post-game content more digestible.
Overall there is a ton of content here for $60. Enough so that I’ll still be playing this game for hours, even after having completed the story missions and some of the side content. TT Fusion has created yet another LEGO game that should easily appeal to not only younger audiences, but Incredibles fans of all ages. Whether you’re a fan of LEGO games or The Incredibles, I think you’ll find that this game is… Incredible.
LEGO The Incredibles is available now for Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One, and PC.