Some time ago I checked out on the Lego series. It took a while for me to actually get involved in it, but when I did it was with reckless abandon. I had multiple friends that couldn’t get enough of the Lego Star Wars game when it first dropped on the PS2 and Xbox, but even though I was a huge Star Wars fan, I just couldn’t get into it. I’ve never been a big fan of hub worlds, I would just rather just navigate a menu. It wasn’t until Lego Lord of the Rings that I actually bought into the series as a whole.

Lego Lord of the Rings still contained a a hub world, although it resembled an open world game. You still ran from one area to the other, but there were things to do in the mean time. This changed things up a bit from the games that I had previously played. I’m not saying that this was the one that introduced this mechanic, but it was the first that I recall. I was quite a fan of this new gameplay, but I felt that the level of repetition was quite off-putting. I started to feel that maybe it wasn’t only the hub worlds that put me off the earlier games in the series.

Marvel Super Heroes was basically an open world super hero game. The amount of characters, with their range of abilities, really changed up the gameplay to an interesting level. The series had finally put in enough different mechanics to keep the game fresh and unique, depending on which character you decided to control at the time. Part of it probably feeds into me growing up a fan of Marvel’s roster, but I would say that it was also the first Lego game that changed enough into a toy box collection of everyone that I grew up fantasizing battling in my youth. This was a feeling that would be short lived unfortunately.

I quickly grew tired of the overall gameplay. Maybe I was forgetting the intended audience of the Lego series, but I did connect with the many licenses that the Lego Universe was able to build upon. I kept wanting to play the games, so that I could interact with the licenses that I loved, but it was hard for me to get beyond the gameplay loop. I dropped off the series just as quickly as I had jumped on. Even though I wanted to like all the trailers that came out and their quirky take on pop culture, I just couldn’t put myself through the process of finding a problem and holding down a button in order to build a bridge, or some other item, to proceed to the next story beat.

You would think that would be enough to keep me away from the new Lego Star Wars game that is coming out. I don’t know if it’s just because I was a big fan of the newest movie, or that I think the humor in the the new trailer looks on point, but I feel once again bought in. I kind of hate myself for this new feeling, but I can’t deny how I feel. I have to assume that they have put the gameplay loop on a new trajectory. The Lego Dimensions series didn’t really change anything as far as the gameplay goes, but I didn’t feel the same way when I watched that trailer as I did when I watched this one.