Lego Horizon Adventures (Switch) Review

Over 30 licensed Lego video games have been produced since 2001, and Lego Horizon Adventures is the latest to join that list. The Lego video games offer an entertaining experience using an existing franchise and combining it with Lego’s fun aesthetic. These games generally have a focus on being family-friendly, co-op play, and the real-life functionality of Lego — breaking and making things out of bricks. As someone who has played almost every single Lego game, this is the experience I was expecting from Lego Horizon Adventures, but after playing the game I’m left wondering… what went wrong?

One of the strongest aspects of the previous Lego games has been the co-op experience. They offer a variety of characters each with their own specific skills and abilities — when playing solo, you’re able to switch between the characters in order to get through levels, but having another player is a lot more fun. Horizon Adventures absolutely gutted that aspect, and there are less than a handful of playable characters and only 3 very similar talents between them – the bow and arrow, a throwing spear and throwable bombs – all of which you unlock fairly early into the game. This complete lack of variety makes the gameplay very stale and repetitive. I have never felt more bored playing a video game than I have playing Horizon Adventures. 

But surely, with limited characters, there’s a better focus on level design at least? No, there really isn’t. Past Lego games all featured puzzles and collectables hidden behind different skills — this gave the levels a huge amount of replayability as you unlock further characters with those skills. You wanted to go back and collect all the things you missed so you can build a mini-figurine or unlock cosmetics, bonus levels, and silly perks. Horizon Adventures has none of this, and each level is mind-numbingly repetitive — you walk into the level, have a cutscene conversation, walk a bit more to a loading screen, have another conversation, walk more into another loading screen where you have another conversation before finally the mini-boss fight at the end of the level.

Every level is like this, though often with more loading screens and the occasional bad guy to fight along the way. There’s no point really exploring each level either as there’s essentially nothing to find; previous games let you smash up the whole scene to collect coins or bricks or secrets, but in Horizon Adventures coins mean almost nothing, and almost nothing is breakable to collect them.

“Does Lego Horizon Adventures do anything well?” I hear you ask. Well yeah, it does. There’s no doubt that this is the best-looking Lego game to date, it is beautiful. It also fixes a lot of pathing and navigation issues Lego games have had in the past, especially when it comes to walking across narrow bridges and climbing around on ledges. I was particularly excited by the way they did Lego water in this game, it’s a cute and fun way to interpret liquids and being able to run around in it is pretty new for these games. The sound design is – as always – fantastic, and I genuinely have no complaints about the quality or performance of the voice actors or music, they did an excellent job. There’s also a character creator, and though it falls very short of past ones, it does the job. The foundations of this game are so strong — it’s pretty, sounds great, and it’s easier than ever to move around. It’s just everything else about this game that lets it down.

Okay so maybe it’s just not a good Lego game, the Horizons series is all about the story and adventure, maybe the focus was on that instead? Oh how I wish that were the case. Lego Horizons Adventures takes an interesting and incredible story and then rewrites it for 8-year-olds. Now, there’s nothing wrong with games for children, in fact many people might think the Lego games are for children and that’s fine, children should experience the joy of video games too. Most children old enough to be playing games are playing things like the many Minecraft games, Fortnight, and Legend of Zelda — they aren’t interested in games that talk to you like Peppa Pig. In past Lego games, the stories have been modified to be more playful and silly than their source material, I enjoy that about them, it’s fun and it’s never been an issue for me before, which is why it feels so jarring and uncomfortable in Horizon Adventures. 

We don’t normally discuss price here but in this case, I feel it needs to be mentioned. This is not a mid-priced game, Lego Horizon Adventures is $110 AUD, that is a full AAA game and it’s not worth it. To put it in perspective it is more expensive than The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, Animal Crossing New Horizons, every Mario game, and every Pokémon game. In my opinion Lego Horizon Adventures would not be worth it at a quarter of its asking price.

Overall, Lego Horizon Adventure is nothing but a lot of loading screens, pretty graphics, and entirely too many cutscenes. It’s like they took all the good, enjoyable parts of the Lego games and the Horizon series and threw them away. It is not a good Horizon game, and it is not a good Lego game.

Rating: 2/5