LEGO Ninjago: Nindroids

Genre: Isometric Action

Players: 1

.

Review:

LEGO Ninjago: Nindroids is an isometric Action game released on PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS in 2014. Nindroids features the characters and world of LEGO’s Ninjago TV series, which is different than The LEGO Ninjago Movie, which is sorta’ a spoof of the Ninjago franchise.

This game follows the same sort of gameplay as LEGO Marvel Super Heroes: Universe in Peril and the Nintendo 3DS version of The LEGO Movie Videogame, which rather than trying to translate the gameplay of the Traveller’s Tales LEGO games directly to the handheld, they instead opt for a simpler Isometric style of play. A style which I would strongly argue has not worked well for them previously.

To this game’s credit, they do make an attempt to bring something more to the table this time. They brought platforming back again, though it’s not used particularly well. Also, they attempted to give the combat more nuance with a new dodge move… which doesn’t really work most of the time. Look, their heads were in the right place, they just failed in the execution. Beyond changes like these, this is more or less the same experience as the other games I mentioned above, which is to say it has tedious combat and simple puzzles.

Once again, the visuals here are extremely underwhelming, using unimpressive 3D visuals stuck in the isometric viewpoint. Yet despite this not being an especially graphics-intensive game, it still suffers from slowdown at times, something that’s mind-boggling. These underwhelming visuals are backed by an energetic but forgettable synthesized soundtrack, and voices and writing that make me want to punch each and every character in this game in the face, especially the heroes.

So once again, we have a LEGO game that aims for a scaled-down, unimpressive version of the LEGO formula, and while this time there was clearly an intention to fix this style of game’s problems, those intentions failed to produce a positive result. Because of this, LEGO Ninjago: Nindroids is yet another underwhelming entry in the LEGO franchise.

tl;dr – LEGO Ninjago: Nindroids is an Isometric Action game that makes some attempt to address the longstanding issues with this style of Isometric LEGO game, but that attempt fails pretty miserably. The result is yet another underwhelming LEGO game you’re better off skipping.

Grade: D+

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