During Summer Game Fest, we got to sit down and go hands on with LEGO Party!, a digital board game for up to four players, that plays…well, it plays a lot like Mario Party, obviously. The good news? I enjoyed it way more than I’ve ever enjoyed Mario Party, and it was one of the most amusing things we played at the show! So let’s take a deeper look in our XboxEra LEGO Party! Hands-on Preview.
Full disclosure – I actively dislike Mario Party. As someone who likes a good board game, Mario Party always bored me to tears, and don’t even get me started on the whole random star awards at the end. I want to make that disclosure, because I really liked LEGO Party, even with the obvious comparisons to Nintendo’s franchise – and that surprised me.
The setup of course is remarkably similar. LEGO Party! has a living, ever-changing LEGO world as its board (there are four different worlds that will ship at launch), replete with spaces on which you move, with your objective to collect the most ‘gold LEGO bricks’ to win. Between goes, you’ll play in some genuinely great mini-games to earn LEGO studs, which can be spent on all sorts of things, from gold bricks, power ups, shortcuts or setting traps for your opponents.
LEGO Party! is set up like a gameshow, with narrators discussing the ongoing competition with some family friendly good humour. Like any good LEGO game, there’s a ton of customisation for your player character available – I’m told over a billion minifigure combinations will exist at launch, from all sorts of ‘iconic’ LEGO sets. I didn’t get to actually play around with this part (We’d have been there all day otherwise) but I do look forward to seeing how silly things can get come launch.
For the preview, we played on the Pirate themed game board, complete with Pirate ship, a roast-turkey shooting volcano and a giant-shortcut-enabling-tentacled Kraken. Unlike Mario Party, the game is kicked off with a minigame first, with the winner of that game going first to actually move around the board. I won the first minigame, which had all four players running across a disappearing platform, requiring us to jump and guess where to step next. As such, I was first on the board to obtain a Golden Brick, which gave me a nice head-start.
What I really liked is that each mini-game provided the opportunity for a practice go before diving in to the one turn that matters, meaning players young and old should be able to have a fair shake at maybe taking the win.
The mini-games so far, have all been genuinely great. We snowboarded, we balanced on machines that would tip over (I just couldn’t get the hang of it at all) and played a fantastic riff on excite-bike that had all of us screaming with laughter. There are 60 different games in the final game, which sounds like more than enough variety to get stuck into and give the game some legs.
As the game continued, things got wildly competitive, with my colleague Aarsal setting up traps with the help of giant crab, who would steal studs for him if we landed on his square, to one of the developers launching a roast turkey from a volcano to steal Jesse’s space on the board. There’s always something special about playing games like this with three friends on the same sofa, but pleasingly the final release will also support cross-platform online multiplayer – and that’s on PC, Xbox, PlayStation and Switch. Lovely stuff.
We look forward to putting LEGO Party! through its paces in our full review later this year.
LEGO Party! will be available later this year on Steam for PC, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch.
