Lego Party review: If Mario Party was tough and on PlayStation

I was mentally prepared for Hollow Knight: Silksong’s bosses to lay waste to me over and over again. I knew that the QWOP-esque Baby Steps would not be a walk in the park. But I did not for the life of me anticipate Lego Party!, the new minigame fest from Moving Out team SMG Studio, to be another milestone in this September of Pain. When set to Hard — hell, even Normal — the curved claw of a minifig NPC shows no mercy. What a treat.

Lego Party! is a Mario Party descendent through and through, which is great news for non-Nintendo folks who’ve been dying for their own chaotic board game experience. (Don’t worry, it’s on Switch too.) The formula is intact: Players are presented with four different boards — Pirate, Ninja, Space, Theme Park — and a mission to collect as many gold bricks as possible before the turn count is up. The Lego twist offers loads of surprises on each stage, including sections that are built on the fly and shake up the design of the boards, and the experience checks all the boxes you’d expect for this kind of game. You gain round Lego studs instead of coins, you cash them in for bricks and power-ups, you face off in various challenges, and traps around the board shake-up the game at a moment’s notice. Familiar, for sure, yet with vivid colors and loads of corny voiceover that give the game some Jackbox energy, Lego Party! never feels like a ripoff. Also, you can actually lose based on sucking — not just a fluke from surprise stars dished out at the end like in Mario Party.

Now, Lego Party! is firmly for all ages; after testing the game out with a 7-year-old accomplice, I can with authority say that kids and grown-ups alike will find an even playing field in Easy mode (and I was bested by the young test subject at least once thanks to some poor dice rolls). The minigames range in flavor — from snowboarding and footraces to ticking-clock logic puzzles and a number of clever challenges that incorporate Lego’s classic bricks – but they’re all simple enough to pick up on the first try. Every corner of Lego Party! is also completely rendered in Lego bricks, leading to some quirky design elements for minigames as basic as “Lunar Lander, but Lego.”

Image: SMG Studio via Polygon

The monkeys stole my studs

Image: SMG Studio via Polygon

But for those who’ve wondered what a truly off-the-leash Mario Party might look like, with competitive minigames that require sharp timing and a full array of joysticking skillz, SMG has delivered with tiers of difficulty. A kart minigame staged on an increasingly frictionless track requires a careful hand when going against NPCs who aren’t as prone to flying off the edges. In “Perfect Pillars,” players time the placement of Lego slabs in order to build the highest tower, but being even a few pips off reduces the size of your next brick, requiring a mastery of pace alongside attention to spatial detail.

Many of the minigames in Lego Party! are composed of multiple rounds with variations on the structure that mean you get to screw up once and still win the day, a forgiving twist on the Mario Party style. But I still found myself hustling to keep up with challenges as simple as pirate jump rope or a game of tag with Lego snails. I intend to push my casual gamer friends to invest in Lego Party! so we can rumble on cross-platform multiplayer and I can stop losing to the savvy-but-humanly-imperfect AI who are really, really, really good at Lego Party!.

Unlike recent iterations of its Nintendo IP counterpart, Lego Party! is limited in modes — basically, you can compete on the traditional game board, play à la carte minigames, or embark on a number of game-specific challenges. What it lacks in variants it makes up for in repeatability on the individual game boards and a robust number of collectibles. There must be hundreds of minifig configurations to unlock, through bonuses achieved by playing rounds of the game or through XP earned in various corners of the game. I may have spent as much time landing on the perfect minifig avatar in Lego Party! as I did during character creation in Baldur’s Gate 3. I was still handily defeated by a mustachioed man wearing an ice cream costume.

Playing Lego Party! is not a novel experience, but an extremely entertaining one. And little things offer a nice change of pace: Each round begins with a minigame instead of concluding with one, and the rankings dictate the turn order for the next round. There are an abundance of ways to earn gold bricks throughout each board, meaning you never feel stranded at the opposite end of the world feeling like you’ve been royally screwed. And overlaying the play is tightly scripted color commentary from two mouthy minifigs — a welcome addition atop zoned-out background music. The team at SMG learned as much from Jackbox as it did Mario Party.

And boy, you can really take a beating. Loss in Nintendo titles can feel so diabolical in an attempt to let players of any age spring back from the Xth place into first. Lego Party! comes closer to a bubbly (bricky?) version of UFO 50, a programming ethos that believes, with correctly calibrated AI opponents, a single button-mashing minigame can be tough and fair and thrilling. The 7-year-old is dying to play more Lego Party! after a few spins, and to my surprise, so am I.

Lego Party! is available now on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2 using a copy provided to Polygon by the publisher. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.

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Author: 360 Technology Group