YMMV / LEGO Adaptation Game

• Annoying Video Game Helper: Seeing the same types of hints/restrictions for the same types of special blocks/switches every single time you pass in front of them, especially when trying to solve a completely different puzzle in the same area, gets very irksome. Thankfully, later games let you turn this off, though some have bugs that cause a few to remain when it's turned off, continuing to be an annoyance.
• Awesome Music: A decent number of the games include game-original disco remixes of iconic songs from the material, with the older games that used Speaking Simlish like the first Star Wars calling it "Disco Party" due to being heard in a Gratuitous Disco Sequence, and all of them greatly capture the funkiness of disco and catchiness of the source music so well you can't help but want to boogie along.
• Broken Base: Since LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes all the games have used voice acting. Some fans like the voice acting because they feel it gives the storylines of the games more depth and makes for more joke opportunities, while you have others who think it makes the humor more cringey and annoying and found the previous minimalist approach more endearing.
• Continuity Lockout: In the earlier games, the cutscenes are only occasional, usually pantomimed, and Played for Laughs. The LEGO Star Wars games have the traditional Opening Scroll before every stage, but aside from that, good luck understanding what's going on without watching the movies first. Avoided in later games, which have intelligible dialogue, though the plethora of Mythology Gags can cause some jokes to fall flat for those playing source-blind.
• Evil Is Cool: A big part of the fun is getting to unlock and play as the villains. Lego recognized this, as many collectibles can only be accessed using a villain's abilities, the first game of the LEGO Batman Trilogy had a secondary campaign featuring Batman's Rogues Gallery, and they eventually released a whole game that focuses mainly on the bad guys.
• Fandom Rivalry: Has something of one with fans of the Pre-LEGO Star Wars era Lego Games, which had more variety, emphasized building more, and were willing to be based in the regular Lego Universe and not just licensed adaptations. That said, most classic-era fans enjoy at least some of the Traveller's Tales games.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Invincibility is featured in most of the games as a power-up to unlock. Granted the games are already simple, but some of the in-game cheats provide effects that are God Mode incarnate. Especially Star Wars: The Complete Saga, but that game has thirty six stages to search compared to the others so it makes perfect sense.
  • The Stud Multipliers, especially as they stack (except in the DS versions, save Rock Band and Indiana Jones 2, where you probably have gotten everything anyway). How does a multiplier of 3840 (2x4x6x8x10) sound?
  • In all three Marvel games, Stan Lee himself is unlockable by completing every Stan Lee in Peril event. Stan has virtually every single ability in each of the games, making him all you pretty much need to find everything.
• Growing the Beard: Developer Traveller's Tales was not held in high regard until LEGO Star Wars. The franchise is viewed to have done this since then as well, although nobody is sure as to when specifically.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: The continual presence of Stan Lee in the Marvel-related games, including always being playable and voiced by the man himself, complete with his classic catchphrases and way of speaking, considering his sudden and unexpected death.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: One of the songs in LEGO Rock Band was the theme of Ghostbusters. Five years later, and LEGO would begin releasing sets of the team.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: To those who think games are Serious Business... but never noticed the score glaring at them once they complete a movie.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Easily the most common complaint about the series - the games are in essence Strictly Formula with only minor differences. Even many LEGO fans aren't interested in the later games for this very reason.
• Junk Rare: Sometimes, you'll have to pay a lot of studs for a character who doesn't give you any additional abilities; villains (Voldemort, Saruman, and Emperor Palpatine for example) are often Junk Rares because their powers have already been introduced in a cheap/free character.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Loads of enemies + destructible terrain x all the studs multipliers = "Tre-shuh BAAAAAAAATH!!!"
  • In late 2019 and early 2020, many people started making their profile pictures have a blue ring around them, in reference to how player 1 of a LEGO game typically has the same ring.
• Nausea Fuel: The "Dynamic" split-screen introduced in LEGO Indiana Jones 2, when you have one co-op character flying around and another standing still trying to do an aiming task; or even worse, when both are in flight. In different directions. It gets difficult to focus or not get dizzy. The feature was eventually axed in later games, with standard vertical and horizontal split-screen being the remaining options.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: The series has been received positively over the years. Note that each game technically comprises two licenses, making it even more of an accomplishment.
• Older Than They Think: When LEGO Star Wars was first released in 2005 many people were baffled by the concept, some even thought it was a joke. Apparently they were unaware that LEGO had been making Star Wars sets since 1999. It wasn't LEGO's first licensed video game either. They had already made two LEGO Creator games based on their Harry Potter line.
• Periphery Demographic: While the games are primarily targeted to kids, they're also popular with adult fans of LEGO and the franchises they're based upon, due to the copious amounts of tongue-in-cheek references and nods to the original works. The Marvel and Batman/DC games in particular have a habit of deliberately capitalizing on their adult secondary audiences, due to featuring many obscure or less prominent characters in them (even if not necessarily plot-relevant), alongside numerous references to popular stories and concepts.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Free Play tends to select characters to play that suit the level's many secrets, but sometimes they don't choose characters with enough abilities to do the level's challenges, forcing either a level replay (though this has been fixed since LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean) or selecting a character manually from the select screen, which sometimes slows down the pacing of the level due to the game loading up the character that isn't in the rotation of characters selected for the level.
  • Jumping puzzles can get incredibly tedious with the number of attempts it takes to get them right, especially in earlier games (and some levels in the later games, though it's averted in the hubs now) where you couldn't select the camera angle. The animation is good, but not good enough to always give the requisite depth to gauge where your character is in relation to their environment and the jump targets. Depending on which console you're using, the button combinations required can make this even trickier, especially if you're playing on the Wii and have to target exactly using the movement of the controller at the same time as getting the combo right. Later games, beginning with LEGO Jurassic World, seem to have finally addressed this properly by having the characters lock on to their next jump target automatically, leaving the player just to worry about the timing.
• Song Association: The games use the soundtracks from their source movies as background music. Play these games enough and hearing those soundtracks may evoke memories of smashing every single bit of LEGO scenery to get studs.
• Surprise Difficulty: Until the release of Rock Band 3, LEGO Rock Band had quite possibly the toughest achievement in all of Rock Band: Getting 100% on the guitar solo in The Final Countdown. Not even the whole song, just the solo. And this is supposed to be a kids' game? And then you have to do it all over again to complete one of the Export Goals in Rock Band 3!
• That One Attack: Since The Original Trilogy, bosses often trap the player's current character, forcing the player to switch to another character to attack the boss with. This began with Emperor Palpatine and his Force Lightning, which was backported to Dooku in The Complete Saga.^note Happened before in the PSP version of The Original Trilogy, which included the Dooku boss level as a bonus feature.
• That One Level: Vehicle levels tend to be rather annoying in general, where no matter the game, the controls are much wonkier than when using minifigures, and a good deal of them are auto-scrollers with easily missable minikits. While the first LEGO Star Wars game had the worst version, with every future case included plenty of Anti-Frustration Features, vehicles levels continue to be the most frustrating and least liked segments in the franchise.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The LEGO Movie 2 adaption is styled more like LEGO Worlds than a traditional LEGO game. Needless to say, many reviewers were displeased by this change to a decade old formula.

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