LEGO Party!

My first thought loading up LEGO Party was that SMG Studio, the team behind Moving Out, had basically been handed the perfect brief: take the Mario Party formula, strip out the Nintendo exclusivity, and wrap it in the most universally beloved toy brand on the planet. The result largely delivers, with a few rough edges that are worth knowing before you commit. The core loop sits inside Challenge Zone, where up to four players roll around a themed board collecting Studs, spending them on Golden Bricks from the merchant Mr. Gold, and occasionally robbing or trapping each other along the way. There are four boards to pick from, each built around a classic LEGO theme: Pirates, Ninjago, Space, and Theme Park. Session length is adjustable too, running anywhere from a brisk six-round game (roughly 45 minutes on the Pirate board) up to a full 24-round marathon on the Theme Park Zone. After every full round of turns, the board pauses and everyone drops into one of the 60 minigames. The variety here is genuinely the game's strongest hand. You get grapple-hook king-of-the-hill battles in Bungee Boogie, frantic object-sorting in Museum Mayhem, rally racing in Rumble Rally, and a tornado survival game called Bricknado, plus dozens more. The studio reportedly prototyped over 250 ideas to get to this final pool, and the curation shows: two full zones in without hitting a repeat is a good sign. The controls across minigames are kept simple enough that an eight-year-old and a thirty-year-old can compete on roughly level terms, while a handful of games carry enough depth for experienced players to actually earn their wins. One thing that genuinely separates this from the Mario Party comparison is how the designers handled randomness. There are no cruel late-game RNG swings that hand the lead to the player who did nothing. Victory here feels tied to decisions and minigame performance rather than a lucky dice roll during the final stretch. That said, the board still has traps, shortcuts, a Thief space that lets opponents steal your haul, and a Power-Up shop, so there is still chaos, just a more earned variety of it. The developers also added a mercy toggle so that stealing a Golden Brick from a player requires a conscious choice rather than automatic plunder, a detail that came directly from playtesting with younger kids. That kind of accessibility thinking runs through the whole game. On the rougher side, the online component is functional but oddly underdeveloped. Cross-play works cleanly between PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch, which is a genuine plus. But there is no matchmaking at all. Finding a random online session means exchanging a five-digit lobby code, which in practice means you are hunting down strangers on Discord. For a multiplayer-first game in 2025, that omission stings. There is also no built-in voice chat, so coordinating online requires a third-party app. Minor PC performance issues, specifically light stutters when loading into maps, are also present across devices and are not a hardware-specific problem. None of these kill the experience, but they chip at the polish. The minifigure customization is deep enough to be a genuine secondary hook. Over a billion combination options drawn from real LEGO sets, plus a carrot-based currency system for unlocking specific figures through play, give completionists a long grind to chase. The visual design across every board is meticulous, with brick-level detail that actually pops on PC at full settings. For families, LEGO fans, or any group of friends who have been watching Nintendo treat Mario Party like a console exclusive forever, this fills a real gap. Solo players get CPU opponents on three difficulty levels and a Score Chaser mode for high-score runs. The lack of matchmaking keeps it from being a true pick-up-and-play online game, so treat it primarily as a couch experience or an organized-friends-online night rather than a solo queue title.

Alex · Scout Team

Catch-all

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