Lego Jurassic World: Goodness cretaceous

For readers of a certain age, combing over the screenshots on these pages will be like glimpsing fleeting moments of their childhood, suspended in amber. Look, there's the classic T-rex chase scene from the original Jurassic Park! And haha! there's the bit where that idiot lawyer gets eaten alive on the bog! But it isn't the amber's sappy lens that's making everyone look all yellow and misshapen. The Jurassic Park films are simply the next stop on Lego's insatiable journey to block-ify the entirety of Hollywood.

And what a great fit it is. The Jurassic Park series' captivating blend of grand set-pieces, sarky humour and stomach-dropping terror are perfect for the Lego parody treatment. As if to prove the point, the first scene we're shown in the demo room is another JP classic a sick triceratops, slumped on the jungle floor next to the fruits of its most recent labour: a steaming, wobbly pile of stinking brown Lego studs. Talk about laying a brick.

You can hop into the triceratops’ scaly hide and ram down gates

The other scientists won't even get near the mountain of crap, but Dr Ellie Sattler? She's all over it like a pack of velociraptors on a stick of Toblerone. She jumps in, demolishes the studs and discovers you need to find three food items including, rather incongruously, an ice lolly to restore the dino to health.

If the disgusted facial expressions are classic Lego game, then so is the rather uninspired fetch quest that follows it. But while Traveller's Tales’ family-friendly formula is light and undemanding, it's also successful and there are fresh DNA injections to make the most of the licence.

The ability to control the dinos, for one! Once you nurse the triceratops back to health, you can hop straight into her scaly hide and use her horns to ram down every destructible-looking gateway in sight. Once unlocked, the dinosaurs can be used to access new areas in the game's two expansive free-roam areas Isla Nublar and Isla Sorna and you can use the genetics lab to play god, creating new dino-types by slicing together heads, torso and tails of unlocked dinos (albeit with some restrictions see the Q&A opposite).

You'll note that all these moments we've been shown come from the very first Jurassic Park however, the game's campaign spans all three existing films, as well as the upcoming Jurassic World. And that's what most has our knees-a-knocking about this game not what we've seen, but what we haven't. While it's easy to pick out iconic moments from the franchise debut, even Dr Sattler wouldn't fancy wading through the muck of The Lost World and Jurassic Park III for parody gold. Revisiting the talking raptor dream sequence? We'd rather walk barefoot over a mile of Lego. Perhaps Warner Bros spent so long worrying whether it could squeeze all four films over the course of 20 levels, it didn't stop to consider whether it should.