Video Game Review: LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean

This video game was released to coincide with the premier of the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, On Stranger Tides. Even though there are sure to be more Pirates movies [1], Traveller's Tales [sic] decided to pack the four extant movies into one game, much like LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues.[2] Recently Lego announced that they'll be producing brick sets based on The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the two movies based on The Hobbit.[3] It seems likely that they'll be licensing Traveller's Tales to make a LEGO video game based on the minifigures. Hopefully they don't try to cram all five movies into one game. That would be tragic. They should at least give us two.

My verdict: This wasn't my favorite of the LEGO games, but I still liked it better than LEGO Batman.[4] Things I liked:

• The way the Jack Sparrow character runs is perfect
• The puppet shows that transition between scenes are kind of fun
• You can actually ride the ships you build out of the minikits
• You can change to any character in your repertoire during free play, not just the ten or so you happen to start out with
• You sometimes had to shoot cannons to progress
• Using Jack's compass to locate hidden objects was a fun idea
• All characters turn to undead when they pick up an Aztec gold piece

Things I didn't like:

• The animations deviate from the original story a lot more than the other LEGO games have
• There were only five levels per movie; I would've liked more
• There weren't any bonus missions
• The game glitched a few times, forcing me to restart a level so that I could finish it
• I still don't like being tricked into starting the next part of a level without the ability to go back
• The final level is called 'The Ride' and it pretends to be the Disneyland ride—I wish it had been the Disneyland ride instead of just a rehashing of the major villains

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Notes:

[1] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates of the Caribbean 5 (2013 film)#Fifth and possible sixth films.

[2] Read my review here.

[3] See the official site at http://thelordoftherings.lego.com/en-us/default.aspx.

[4] Even though it's my least favorite of the LEGO franchise, I still plan on owning its sequel, LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes.