The Lego Movie 2 Videogame has also shaken up the standard formula in more ways than one. Originally, Lego games had different characters with different abilities that players would rotate through to unlock all the games many many secrets. But in The Lego Movie 2 game things have changed, because each of the characters is now a master builder, even the hilarious background characters you can unlock, apparently, the abilities are tied to a building mechanic. Just like all the other Lego games, half the fun is destroying heaps of Lego structures to build something needed to progress, but now it’s up to the player to build the right tool. At the beginning of the game you quickly get blueprints for generators, trampolines and sprinklers. These can then be built wherever they are needed in the map, requiring a little imagination from the player when it comes to exploring these open world areas.Because The Lego Movie 2 game has quite the open world. It might not be Red Dead Redemption 2, but it is much bigger than the typical corridors that Lego titles used in entries like Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Indiana Jones. The Lego Movie 2 Videogame is, in fact, the most open world the game has been, complete with side quests and a focus on exploration.So you will take on characters like Emmet and Lucy in a bid to free your friends from the strange alien inhabitants of the faraway Systar System.

It means traversing different colourful worlds like The Wild West, Bricksburg and Apocalypseburg to do a multitude of tasks along the base story while also roaming off to explore the sandbox and earn ever-more purple bricks.

The Lego Movie 2 video game does not work in the same way as the usual Lego games, but it is not an entirely new concept. It’s more of an amalgam of everything that’s come before, with basic gameplay similar to the regular titles but combined with the hub worlds of Lego Dimensions and the customisation of Lego Worlds. Which sounds fine in theory but in practice is one of the most boring and badly-made games we’ve played all year.

The basic gameplay vaguely tries to replicate that of the regular Lego games, but in as boring a way as possible. Each environment, including some from the first movie, has its own open world hub area where you and a friend can explore and punch random parts of the background to reveal studs. You can also scan pre-build objects to gain new blueprints and mine resources to build them in your own customisable hub, that works like a simplified version of the Minecraft-esque Lego Worlds. There are lots of different characters to play as but rather than having their own unique abilities everything is dependent on items which you collect and unlock in a specific order. You can go back with different tools afterwards but ploughing through the story involves no thought or experimentation at all, while also removing all the fun of collecting and exploring. That’s an understatement though. The game doesn’t just remove the fun it puts it in a rocket and fires it into the sun. Collecting objects now happens primarily through the medium of what are essentially loot boxes, as you discover relics that can be redeemed as random characters, vehicles, buildings, and items. There’s thankfully no microtransactions but the relics have to be taken back to an in-game shop to be opened and sitting through that process for every single one is tortuously dull – especially once you realise most of them are going to be duplicates anyway.

Again, this is ideal for the little ones and on just two days my son and I had clocked up more than three hours game time collectively passing the controller and rounding up horses, building shops, getting engines working and taking on the odd alien superboss in a showdown.

And there’s a ton of items to discover during the game.

You’ll find yourself hunting down different coloured relics which you can then get a shopkeeper to open for you to reveal new objects, characters and buildings in your armoury.

The graphics can pop in and out of the screen a little too often for my liking as the engine struggles to keep all the bricks on screen.

Part of the problem is that the game is clearly a victim of a tiny budget and very short turnaround, issues which have plagued the franchise since its inception. The Lego games are always full of bugs and glitches, with the hapless developers never given enough time to polish their work to a properly finished state.

And the story is basic at best.

It’s not really for the adults alone either, with limited appeal to the full-time gamer.

But overall, I thoroughly enjoyed playing this game with my son.

And anyone who has young kids hooked on Lego and exploring a big open world full of things to discover will love this.