LEGO Party! Review: There's A New Friendship Ender On The Block
LEGO Party is an admirable attempt at replicating Nintendo’s party game formula. It does enough to distinguish itself from the competition, but not enough to surpass it.
As a big fan of the Mario Party series, yes even the bad ones, I had high hopes for LEGO Party. After playing it at Summer Game Fest 2025, I was confident that it would be a fun alternative to Nintendo’s party games, without necessarily being better or worse. They say variety is the spice of life and while the core gameplay was the same, just the fact it was LEGO felt like enough to have it stand out.
After playing a few games, I think I was spot on with my analysis from my first round with the game, as while it has a lot going for it, there are a few issues that could have been ironed out.
Let’s talk about the positives first as there’s a lot to discuss. LEGO Party shines brightest in its presentation. While LEGO Voyagers sometimes made me forget I was playing a LEGO game, LEGO Party proudly shows off its creativity with its roster of characters, levels, and minigames.
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It has that LEGO Movie vibe where the world doesn’t just look the part, it feels and moves like the real-life building blocks toys it’s based on.
You can customise your character with loads of goofy outfits and designs, before diving into an equally goofy level, like a pirate cove or the world of Ninjago. Every in-game asset is based on a real-life piece or model, and on one of the loading screens, it was said that if you took every piece used to develop the game, you could fill a football stadium, which is pretty cool. I’m hoping more themes get added as DLC expansions too, like Power Miners or maybe even Bionicle. Ninjago is cool but I’d have liked to have seen more.
Once you’re in the game, it plays pretty much exactly the same as Mario Party. You collect studs from spaces and minigames that are used to purchase Gold Bricks, and the player with the most Gold Bricks by the end wins. You can visit shops to purchase items that’ll help you move around the board quicker, as well as perform other actions, and special spaces can trigger special events on the board or turn the tables on your opponents.
Something LEGO Party does differently though is allow you to build new paths on the board you’re currently playing on. For example, the pirate level gave us the choice of building a new island with either a temple of treasure or a massive cannon, both of which will add new gameplay mechanics to the board. It’s a neat addition, but not one that drastically changes anything. That said, it ties in well with the theme of LEGO so I liked its inclusion.
At the end of everyone’s turn, you get to play a minigame, which all players have a say in as it’s put to a vote. The minigames vary in quality, in my opinion, but my personal favourites include a curling game where you simulate penguins sliding on their bellies, a dancing rhythm game, and a safe-cracking one where you have to input codes as quickly as you can. There weren’t many minigames, from the ones I played, that I really didn’t like; some were just better than others.
Each game we played took around 40 minutes or so to finish, and that was with eight turns each. You can decrease or increase the number of turns based on your preference but it seems like a reasonable amount. Unlike Mario Party, it really didn’t feel like we were playing for that long either, something that might actually have worked to the game’s detriment…
Moving on to what I didn’t like, the challenge. I don’t know what gruelling training regimens the AI were put through but they’re too damn smart. At first we thought it was just because we were new to the game, but we knocked them down to Easy at one point and they were still finishing minigames in record-time. It didn’t feel like Mario Party either where you could potentially outplay them; they were simply 10 steps ahead at every turn. This will apparently be remedied with some patches.
Something else that rubbed me up the wrong way is actually tied to the presentation I praised earlier. LEGO Party is presented like a game show, and every game show needs game hosts to spectate. LEGO Party has two hosts that will narrate pretty much everything anyone does in the game, and while the writing is on point as always, it went from humorous to irritating very quickly. There’s nothing worse than losing a Gold Brick you spent three turns trying to get to then have the LEGO equivalent of Statler and Waldorf heckle you from the sidelines.
The biggest drawback for LEGO Party though is how one-sided the games can feel. The overpowered AI is largely responsible for this but I think if you took the AI out, the game would still have this problem. When you’re losing in a game like this, chances are you’ve just had some bad luck, but even in Mario Party, there’s always a chance of bouncing back either with some clever item usage or, when all hope is lost, praying you get some bonus stars at the end of the game.
LEGO Party doesn’t have Bonus Bricks which I can accept and even appreciate, but when your luck was down and you desperately needed to claw your way back from last place, it didn’t feel like you had many options to do so, at least not reliable ones. It felt like too many spaces and mid-game events made you lose studs and bricks, ruining your chances of making a comeback. I’m not saying it needs the same pity-party mechanics that Mario Party has but it definitely needs a re-balance, in my opinion. Maybe when the AI is tweaked the game will open up more.
Ultimately, LEGO Party has a lot going for it. It was never going to be the superior party game, Nintendo and its red plumber have thrown far too many epic shindigs to be overtaken in that regard, but what LEGO Party offers is an alternative with a different aesthetic and overall vibe, as well as one playable on all platforms, not just Nintendo ones.
Pros: Presentation is on point and very LEGO, nice selection of boards and customisable characters, minigames are fun and varied
Cons: AI is far too strong, some of the core mechanics could do with a re-balance
For fans of: Mario Party, LEGO Voyagers, LEGO games in general
8/10: Excellent
LEGO Party! Releases on 30 September 2025 on PlayStation 5 (version tested), Xbox Series X/S, PC, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2. A review code was provided by the publisher. Read a guide to our review scores here.