Author: Game Infliction

Given that the LEGO brand has been slapped onto almost every kind of family-friendly multiplayer game you can think of at this point, from kart racers to Super Smash Bros clones and even a Rock Band spin-off, it’s surprising that it’s taken this long for the world’s biggest brick maker to construct its own monument to Mario Party. LEGO Party is something more than a block-based knockoff of Nintendo’s long-running virtual boardgame series, though. Sure, it might use Mario Party’s fundamentals as a baseplate to build upon, with a host of wacky minifigs in place of the Mushroom Kingdom’s finest, but every last piece here is absolutely pulsating with personality and there isn’t a single stud-based dud in the 60 minigames on offer. If lots of laughter is what you’re after, LEGO Party has all the right parts for assembling a fun night in with friends and family.

If you’ve ever played one of Nintendo’s party-starters before then the basics of LEGO Party will be as easy to grasp as a tiny coffee mug in a minifig’s fist. In this instance, the goal is to collect gold bricks and studs instead of stars and coins, as you and three other players move around four uniquely themed game boards littered with various stud-sapping hazards and potentially lucrative event spaces to land on. Depending on the board you choose, each session can be as short as six rounds or roughly 45 minutes but can be extended all the way up to three-hour-long, 24-round epics, and each round pits all four players against each other in a minigame designed to be easy to pick up for LEGO Juniors and old-timer Technic fans alike, but tricky to master.

Everybody can carry up to three power-ups that can be bought with studs at the shop or collected from Wheel of Fortune-style spins, and these can have dramatic leaderboard-levelling impacts, like teleporting your minifig directly to a gold brick space, or slowing your roll so you can increase your chances of moving the exact number of spaces you need. Many of these basics have been established in the Mario Party blueprint several times over, and Lego Party takes an ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fish the dog-eared instruction booklet out of the toy chest and rebuild it’ approach to keeping many of these proven core concepts intact.

However, there are some key elements to be found in LEGO Party’s Pirate, Ninjago, Space, and Theme Park boards that set them apart. For starters, each minigame is chosen democratically by moving your minifig in front of one of three options presented at the beginning of each round, and I liked that it meant my party was given a bit more control over which events we were able to enjoy in each evening’s session. (Of course, if you prefer a more randomised minigame experience like Mario Party, you can opt for that too.) I also prefer LEGO Party’s system of letting the results of each minigame determine the order of turns in each subsequent round, as opposed to Mario Party’s more rigid setup of dictating the order via a dice roll at the start and sticking with that all the way to the end. I find that LEGO Party’s results-driven method increases the ebb and flow of each board and brings extra incentive to do well in each minigame.

More notably, each of LEGO Party’s wonderfully candy-coloured and brilliantly detailed boards has a number of special construction zones to land on, giving you the choice of two structures to build on that space that can dramatically alter the map and introduce a variety of game-changing additions. For example, in the Theme Park board you might opt to build the Extreme Zone, which introduces a gauntlet run of twitchy stunt challenges to successfully pull off in order to earn a gold brick. Alternatively you could go for the Royal Ramparts, which brings with it a ballista-based minigame for quickly snaring studs, and a catapult for lobbing you at another random player and stealing one of their gold bricks. Mixed in with the various other board-specific features, like when the Space map briefly transforms into a turn-based battle against a giant green alien, and each go-around of these game boards has felt fresh and fun over the dozen or so hours of playtime my family and I have put in together so far.

Everything is Awesome

It’s also been consistently funny, and that’s largely due to the inclusion of Ted Talker and Paige Turner, LEGO Party’s own quip-cracking commentary team. Seemingly inspired by gag-making game show playcallers like those of Wipeout or Holey Moley, Ted and Paige provide colourful context to each turn taken, as well as responding in real time to each player’s performance in a minigame – either bigging them up when they’re on top, or hilariously dragging them when they’re struggling. Surprisingly, even after multiple playthroughs of each of LEGO Party’s four boards I’ve barely heard the same joke twice, although in fairness that could be because half the time the commentary has been completely drowned out either by fits of uncontrollable laughter or salty bickering as a hard-earned gold brick is ruthlessly snatched away from another player. Seriously, if you’re playing with a competitive group, that tends to sting harder than suddenly finding a lost LEGO brick with the fleshy part of your bare foot.

The rest of the comedy in LEGO Party stems from the competitive chaos of the challenges themselves, and developer SMG Studio – who previously entertained with the slapstick-based shenanigans of its Moving Out series – has really outdone itself as far as crafting a construction derby of morish minigames. From memory-testing challenges to physics-driven races and rhythm-based dance-offs, Lego Party’s roster of minigames is as diverse as it is diverting, dripping with personality and creative flair. Besides, it’s always a great indication for how immediately engaging multiplayer minigames are when players get caught up in the competition without realising they haven’t even left the pre-game practice screen, which has been a regular occurrence during my time with LEGO Party so far.

Some minigames are terrific, toybox tributes to other titans of multiplayer mayhem, such as the obstacle course dash that feels straight out of Fall Guys or the zero-gravity space shuttle soccer that’s very much in the same orbit as Rocket League. Others lean into the familiarly tactile feel of playing with LEGO itself, like the one that involves trying to build monsters out of a pile of different-shaped blocks without being provided any instructions. There’s one challenge with four soccer goals to defend from an ever-increasing number of balls that plays out like an inverted game of Hungry Hungry Hippos, and another that sits each minifig on a LEGO motorbike and challenges you to navigate an undulating course like a cutesy recreation of Trials HD.

Some of the most popular minigames amongst the contestants on my couch are the ones that feel like nothing else we’ve ever played. There’s the frantic, four-way battle to smash your opponents’ LEGO vase with a brick boulder that gradually speeds up as it’s deflected off each player, or the nightclub-themed showdown that sees each of you scramble to fling your minifig onto a floating dance floor with elastic grappling hooks. Of course, everyone in my party has their own personal picks: I love anything on four-wheels, my son’s really into the zero-gravity games, while my daughter’s favourite is… basically whichever minigame she won most recently. But the quality of challenges here is so consistent across the game board, that even when we opt for a random minigame choice we’re rarely disappointed with whatever comes our way.

Everything is Cool When You’re Part of a Team

I also appreciate that success in these minigames is mostly reliant on a combination of skill and luck. You won’t find any cheap button-mashing challenge types here like the ones that often pop up in Mario Party, which I always felt put unnecessary wear and tear on my expensive game controllers, not to mention seeming somewhat unfair to the younger players in my lounge room who haven’t had decades of button-pressing practice pumped into their biceps.

There also aren’t any lopsided three-vs-one match types to force the majority to unfairly gang up on an individual, as LEGO Party’s minigames are always evenly split – either every man for himself, or face-offs in teams of two on the occasions you land on a Brick Battle square. These team-based clashes range from the pure intensity of a doubles game of air hockey through to more ridiculous co-op tasks where one person aims a T-shirt cannon and the other fires it at an audience of shirtless minifigs, and all of them demand effective communication and coordination between duos in order to get the win. In fact, I enjoyed these Brick Battles so much that I was slightly disappointed to find there were only nine of them included in the roster.

Even so, I am happy that LEGO Party doesn’t bother with random participation awards at the end of each board, like many Mario Party games do. There’s still plenty of twists and turns as fortune-changing chance spaces are sprinkled across the map in the closing stages, and many games I’ve played have seen the lead constantly change hands all the way through to the final round, but the winner is always clearly defined by the time you reach the end – not unfairly elevated into first position after the fact purely because of some arbitrary, unseen statistic like they happened to land on the most event spaces. It makes victory feel like it was achieved through genuine merit rather than more mystifying means. That doesn’t mean that other players won’t take any opportunity to knock you off the winner’s podium, though – and I mean that quite literally, especially during the riotously interactive results screen that typically devolves into delirious slap fights, slipping on banana peels, and background breakdancing.

While LEGO Party’s lineup of playable minifigs might not feature anyone as iconic as Mario or Yoshi, it makes up for it in terms of sheer numbers and the substantial suite of options for character customisation. Playing through each of the game boards or one of the curated minigame playlists earns XP that gradually unlocks new minifigs along a series of simple progression paths, as well as awarding you carrots that can be spent unlocking a separate collection of minifigs in the shop. There are more minifigs here than you could shake a mini twig at – by my count well over 200, from goth kid minifigs to person-shaped pizza slices and stylish ninja warriors – and as you unlock each one their individual parts can be used to craft entirely new creations of your own. Want a minifig with tigerprint pants, a Miami Vice-style linen jacket, and an American football helmet? Weird combination but sure, it’s all yours.

Speaking of bolting things together, I’d love to see LEGO Party leverage the many pop culture partnerships that the Danish brickmaker has amassed over the years and bring them to the party either in the form of expansion packs or future sequels. A LEGO Star Wars board with minigames designed around lightsaber battles and Death Star trench runs would be a treat, as would a LEGO Indiana Jones board that had event spaces to trigger Raiders of the Lost-ark style booby traps and boulders. Given Nintendo’s cosying up with the LEGO brand in recent times, it’s not inconceivable that we could even see a LEGO Mario LEGO Party expansion, at least in the Switch versions, to really bring things full circle. To be clear, nothing of this nature has been announced and I’m merely thinking out loud, but I’ve had a blast with LEGO Party so far, and I really hope that it’s set the fantastic plastic foundations for a series that’s here to stay.

Resident Evil has been one of the video game industry’s quintessential, flagship horror games for years now, delivering everything over the years from unsettling, atmospheric haunting to outright jumpscares. But as its development team continues to search for new ways to freak people out, a few of its leaders are admitting that they’re not always 100% certain what elements of Resident Evil are actually scary anymore.

This comes from our interview with director Koshi Nakanishi and producer Masato Kumazama at Tokyo Game Show 2025. We started by talking about Resident Evil: Requiem’s new protagonist, Grace, and her differences from the more action-oriented Leon S. Kennedy. That led to a discussion of why the series was pulling back on the heavy action elements in Requiem, as Nakanishi explains:

I think you can broadly classify Resident Evil titles on a scale of how much they’re like Resident Evil 2 or Resident Evil 4. Resident Evil 7 was definitely on the 2 side of that, as it returned to survival horror roots and was very acclaimed for that. Resident Evil Village built on that and added in more action and gunplay and brought it toard the RE4 side of that particular scale. But if we kept going in that direction there’s almost an inflation effect, where you have to keep adding more and more action to outdo the previous title, and by doing that you ultimately end up where Resident Evil 5 and 6 went, and although they’re still great games, the general consensus is that they pushed Resident Evil so far in the action direction that it was no longer horror. I didn’t want to have to do that with Resident Evil’s ninth title where I just tried to outdo the action in Village and ended up making something I didn’t want to make. Firmly swinging the scale toward the Resident Evil 2 style was our intention, and it’s almost an upgrade of that Resident 2 style.

But that led to a follow-up question where I asked Nakanishi about the other side of the coin, of trying to outdo their own scares with each new title. Nakanishi noted that their goal isn’t necessarily to innovate horror, but there is a certain numbing effect that working on these games for so long has, where they really need to see audience reactions to know if what they’ve made is actually scary or not.

“We’ve made so many of these that we can’t tell anymore until someone else plays it,” Nakanishi says. “There was actually a bit of a worry internally before we showed the [Resident Evil: Requiem] hands-off at SGF and the first hands-on at Gamescom, was this actually scary? Because we don’t even know anymore. This is our bread and better, what we make every day.”

I ended up asking Nakanishi if there was anything they had cut from the game for being too scary. He couldn’t recall anything specific that was actually removed from the game after it had been added, but he did remember one anecdote that might make fans of Ethan Winters chuckle:

“We didn’t really implement it, so it wasn’t cut, but- we don’t know if something’s scary. So we say, we’ll do this, we’ll do that, we keep adding on stuff, and at one point we were like, what if [Grace] gets a big gash in her leg, or her leg gets cut off, because that thing attacks her, and oh my god it’s so scary, but we talked ourselves down a little bit.”

So at least we know Grace probably isn’t going to have the same issues Ethan did with hands. Probably.

We previewed Resident Evil: Requiem just last month, and you can read our impressions of what we’ve seen so far right here. You can also check out the rest of my discussion with Nakanishi and Kumazawa, including how Reqiuem came to the Nintendo Switch 2 and what’s going on with Leon Kennedy. We’ve also previously spoken to the pair on a number of other topics, such as Raccoon City’s return and the game’s new monster design.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

IGN recently held a fan-voted tournament to determine the greatest racing game of all time. There were a total of 32 entries split across four categories: Arcade Racing, Simulation, Street Racing, and Wild Card.

While Mario Kart 8 Deluxe ultimately won the fan vote and was crowned champion, it isn’t exactly known for its realism. Several other entries in the tournament give you the chance to drive cars based on real-life counterparts, including a wide variety of different Toyota models.

The Toyota brand has been around for almost 90 years and competes in several different racing series, meaning there are lots of different models that can be included in racing games. And some games make very good use of that. Here are five standout titles that were popular in our fan-voted tournament and also put you in the driver’s seat of Toyota cars.

Forza Horizon 5

Forza Horizon 5 has the rare distinction of getting a 10 from IGN, and it finished as the runner-up in our fan-voted tournament, so we think it’s safe to call this one of the best racing games ever made. One of its many strengths is the dizzying number of cars in its roster. It had more than 500 vehicles at launch, and DLCs and seasonal additions have brought that number to more than 900 in the nearly four years since it released. That includes 32 different models of Toyota, ranging from classic sports cars like the 1974 Celica GT to pickup trucks like the 2020 Tundra TRD Pro to rally cars like the 2021 GR Yaris to modern sports cars like the 2022 GR86.

Gran Turismo 7

Gran Turismo 7 won the Simulation region of our tournament and made it to the Final Four before being ousted by Forza Horizon 5. It was a very close battle between the two, so this is clearly a beloved title. And IGN gave it a 9, so we’re big fans too. Like the game that defeated it, GT7 also sports an incredible number of different cars. It had 424 cars at launch and has since brought that number to more than 500, which includes 41 Toyota models. In addition to the kinds of sports cars, rally cars, and pickups that are present in Forza Horizon 5, there are also LMP1 cars like the TS030 Hybrid ’12 and TS050 Hybrid ’16, as well as concept cars like the FT-1 and FT-1 VGT.

Forza Motorsport 4

Forza Motorsport 4 might be 14 years old, but it still holds up as an outstanding racing game and celebration of all things four-wheeled. It had a tough draw in our tournament, dominating its first-round matchup before having to go up against the juggernaut that is Gran Turismo 7 in the second round. IGN gave Forza Motorsport 4 a 9.5, and like the two games that preceded it on this list, its vast selection of cars was a big reason why. That included 19 different models of Toyotas, highlighted by the S class 2002 Top Secret 0-300 Supra, one of the most powerful Unicorn cars in the game.

Project Gotham Racing 2

Project Gotham Racing 2 might not have catapulted into mainstream popularity like the previous games on this list, but IGN gave it a 9.5 and it holds a special place in our hearts, largely because of its focus on style in addition to speed. You earn Kudos points for doing things like powersliding, catching air, driving clean races, and drafting behind opponents. And many goals require that you finish with a certain number of Kudos points, meaning you have to balance driving fast with driving pretty, providing a gameplay experience that separates it from other racing games. That sense of style extended to the cars themselves, too. There were three Toyota models in the game, and they’re all classics: the 1967 2000GT, MR2 Spider, and 1996 Supra.

Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition Remix

In what some might have considered a surprise, Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition Remix made it to the quarterfinals of our tournament and put up a solid fight against Forza Horizon 5. This is the updated version of Rockstar’s third game in the series, which added new vehicles, songs, races, maps, updated UI, and brought back Tokyo from Midnight Club 2. It was a marked improvement over said predecessor, and while it was never the fastest or prettiest game around, it more than made up for that with depth and variety. IGN gave it an 8.8, and it let you drive, customize, and fine-tune the 1998 Toyota Supra Turbo.

LEGO has been crushing it with its video game sets. I honestly can’t think of a single miss. The LEGO NES set, the LEGO Pac-Man arcade cabinet, and even the recent SEGA Genesis controller (which was only available as a Gift With Purchase) all paid loving homage to the source material and managed to squeeze in clever surprises and Easter eggs. I’m happy to say the LEGO Game Boy, in spite of its smaller size, still managed to sneak in a few surprises, but if you’re hoping for something as elaborate as the NES Easter Egg, or the hand-crank movement and hidden ’80s arcade scene of the Pac-Man set, definitely temper your expectations.

How Big Is the LEGO Game Boy?

At 421 pieces, the LEGO Game Boy is the smallest of the available video game console sets LEGO has issued over the years, but in spite of a relatively small brick count, its efficiency of parts still makes for an exceptional whole. When it’s fully assembled, it looks everything the part of the original, although it’s just a touch smaller.

It also comes with bricks to build a small display stand, and a second, smaller display stand that shows off a cartridge and also serves as a place to store the extra lenticular game screens.

There are three game screens in all: one for Super Mario Land that has Mario hitting a block to reveal a star, one for Link’s Awakening that shows Link and Zelda gazing to the sea as gulls fly over head, and one that’s just the Nintendo logo scroll when you power on the Game Boy.

Swapping screens is no factor at all, you just pop off the back panel and drop it in place. It’s held secure with a little lever that’s easy to move and has just the right amount of give to keep it from moving without pressing so hard as to deform the thin lenticular sheets.

Since this model is based on the original Game Boy and not its later revisions, the graphics are in the sickly greens of that original 160 x 144 display. They’re sharp, too, and look exactly like how you remember them. They’re lovely. I hope they make more.

How Long Does it Take to Build the LEGO Game Boy?

In order to get the most appropriate timing on the LEGO Game Boy as I could, I popped in my Blu-ray copy of the 1989 Nintendo feature-length commercial “The Wizard.” My goal was to see if I could complete the build before Fred Savage, Jenny Lewis, and the titular Wizard made it to California.

I’m happy to say, in spite of having to get up to let my dogs out and then back in, I snapped the final piece into place just as Jenny Lewis stepped onto the dry soil of California on the way to the world Nintendo championships, so just about an hour after I pushed play. Not a bad build time, and again, the final results are so much better than it feels like should be possible with a set this size.

Since it’s a 421-piece build, there are only five bags of parts inside the box, and they’re small bags. I have a little organizer basket from Walmart, the sort of thing you put on a shelf to store buttons and doo-dads for crafts, and I use it to organize parts bags when I build sets. For this build, it was overkill. I still used it, but really, there was no need to. I’m just a creature of habit.

I was surprised at the color selection of the bricks: lots of greens, browns, gold, and copper-colored pieces. Then it occurred to me the colors for the interior mimic the colors of a printed circuit board. That’s one of the first Easter eggs. As you’re putting it together, the parts on the inside you’ll never see again evoke the look of the inside of a real Game Boy, or any electronic gizmo of the era. It’s obviously not a 1:1 representation of the circuitry, but it’s a close enough approximation that I was suitably impressed.

The cartridges also follow this circuit board aesthetic on their insides, and the coolest Easter Egg in the set is in the Link’s Awakening cartridge. Now, LEGO didn’t need to do this at all, because again, once you put it together, you never see it again, but inside of the Link’s Awakening cart is a “back up battery” piece.

If you don’t know, in order to keep save files on those old carts, there had to be a small coin-cell battery providing a trickle of power to keep the electrons dancing soldered onto the board. Link’s Awakening was one such cart, and they went ahead and added that detail into the LEGO version, for no reason other than to please people like me. The Super Mario Land cart had no such battery back up and so the LEGO version doesn’t either.

The stickers for the carts are exact replicas of the ones on the originals, and I went into a state of hyper concentration to make sure I placed them exactly where they needed to be. Usually I put on LEGO decals with the same tweezers I use for scale models, but this time I just went raw dog on them and did pretty well.

LEGO Game Boy Controls

The power switch, D-pad, A and B buttons, contrast, and volume knobs, and start and select buttons are all functional. Well, “functional” meaning “they move.” The power switch in particular feels exactly like the one on the original Game Boy. When you switch it on, it’s so accurate to how you remember it feeling, you can’t help but expect to hear that familiar chime. Obviously it doesn’t, but your brain will fill in the details.

The rest of the buttons don’t feel exactly like they did on the original unit, but they still provide enough tactile feedback to get the job done. After the power switch, the A and B buttons probably feel the most accurate, with a little rubber band system rigged up to give them a little resistance and travel when you press them.

No LEGO Game Boy Tetris

If you’re going into the LEGO Game Boy hoping for a Tetris Easter egg, or any Tetris content at all, you’re going to be disappointed. While Tetris was the original pack-in game for the Game Boy, and no doubt helped to popularize both the console and the game itself, it’s nowhere to be seen here. My guess is it has to do with licensing, as Tetris wasn’t a Nintendo game but was merely licensed to Nintendo back in 1989 and it was almost certainly easier to include two first-party Nintendo titles with the kit.

So if you were hoping for a little Tetris homage hiding inside, I’m sorry to say there just isn’t one. Take it up with The Tetris Company Inc.

The LEGO Game Boy is scheduled for an October 1 release date, but Amazon and other retailers have gone ahead and broken street date. That means a lot of people spent their weekend putting together this delightful little LEGO Game Boy kit, and between its short build time and excellent final result, I recommend picking one up if you have any nostalgia for the good old days of the 4-battery OG Game Boy. The kit is also pretty reasonably priced at $59.99, and you can go ahead and pick it up right now and get it on, or even before, its October 1 release date.

Seth Macy is Senior Social Commerce Producer, and just wants to be your friend. You can find him online.