8 LEGO Video Games That Were Way More Ambitious Than Anyone Expected

2 hours ago 1

Published Feb 5, 2026, 2:59 PM EST

Daniel has been playing games for entirely too many years, with his Steam library currently numbering nearly 750 games and counting. When he's not working or watching anime, he's either playing or thinking about games, constantly on the lookout for fascinating new gameplay styles and stories to experience. Daniel has previously written lists for TheGamer, as well as guides for GamerJournalist, and he currently covers tech topics on SlashGear.

Over the decades of LEGO-branded video games, the predominant attitude toward them has been positive, if not particularly exciting. They’re games based on kids’ toys, after all; even my favorite LEGO games of my youth, like LEGO Island or LEGO Racers, I would hesitate to call “ambitious.” While a lot of LEGO games are relatively simple, though, that doesn’t mean all of them are.

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Some LEGO games, both original ones and those based on licensed IPs, go a few extra steps beyond what anyone may have expected in terms of design, gameplay, or sheer scope. If any franchise could surprise us with its ambitions, it would certainly be LEGO. I still remember the first time I saw a life-sized sculpture made entirely out of LEGO bricks, and tried to wrap my head around the realization that it was made of the same plastic bits that littered the floor of my bedroom. Who says the same can’t be true of video games?

To clarify, we’re specifically focusing on a game’s ambitions, what it was aiming for with its release. Whether it actually worked or not is a separate matter.

8 LEGO City Undercover

A Fleshed-Out Open World

When you think of the most noteworthy LEGO games of the last few years, it’s a safe bet you’ll think of one of the licensed games first and foremost. That’s not unreasonable; LEGO’s own original sets aren’t nearly as distinct or well-known as something like Marvel or Star Wars. That didn’t stop Traveller’s Tales from taking a crack at the concept with LEGO City Undercover, creating a pretty distinctive game in the process.

LEGO City Undercover is based on the real-life series of LEGO City building sets. LEGO City is, well, a city. Just a normal city. There’s nothing inherently exciting about it, but technically, the same could be said about any large city you see in an open-world game. Therein lay the secret sauce: LEGO City Undercover uses its city as a backdrop to present a wonderfully wacky story of crime fighting and espionage. Unlike in the licensed games, there are no established characters or story that need to be represented, so the designers and writers could do pretty much whatever they wanted.

LEGO City, despite being made of bricks, is fully realized. It has districts, pedestrians, and moving traffic, and you can wreck it all for fun by irresponsibly driving a police car through the city streets. It’s an ambitious game in that it manages to sell you entirely on its own fun factor, rather than nostalgic IP recognition, while also being a more wholesome version of GTA.

7 LEGO Marvel Super Heroes 2

Across Time and Space

LEGO Marvel Super Heroes 2

The original LEGO Marvel Super Heroes was the first LEGO game based on the Marvel franchise, and was a pretty good game. It had a large roster of heroes, and a sizable recreation of Manhattan to freely explore. The hard part of making a sequel to something like that is figuring out how, exactly, you’re supposed to broaden the scope, but LEGO Marvel Super Heroes 2 found a way.

LEGO Marvel Super Heroes 2 is set in Chronopolis, a sort of patchwork city cobbled together from various locales across the Marvel multiverse by Kang the Conqueror. Chronopolis is a pretty impressive sandbox due to the number of different places represented, including K’un-L’un, Wakanda, Asgard, Manhattan, Nueva York, and Sakaar, to name a few. The sandbox is full of sidequests hosted by just about every Marvel character you can think of, all with full voice acting.

Speaking of the characters, the game’s roster is enormous, with nearly 300 different minifigs and bigfigs to control, including some of my favorite under-represented characters like Fin Fang Foom, A-Bomb, and Black Knight. Also, all the secret post-game levels are hosted by Gwenpool, and any game that even acknowledges Gwenpool deserves to be commended in my book.

6 LEGO DC Super-Villains

Be Your Own Villain

Unlike Marvel, DC stuff was pretty well-represented in the field of LEGO games earlier on, with the first LEGO Batman game launching back in 2008. With each subsequent LEGO Batman game, though, the series gradually broadened its scope to the wider DC Comics universe, eventually leading to its most ambitious entry, LEGO DC Super-Villains.

LEGO DC Super-Villains has two big factors going for it. Firstly, it has a custom character creator. It wasn’t the first licensed LEGO game to have this feature, but it was the first to actually integrate your created character into the game’s overall story, and as a villain no less. LEGO games are usually pretty squeaky-clean, so it was interesting to get to be a bad guy, even if it was in more of a cheeky capacity rather than an overtly evil one.

The other factor is the game’s open world. Not only do you have the full scope of both Gotham City and Metropolis to run rampant over, pretty much everything within the same zip code is free to explore, including Smallville and Arkham Asylum, as well as faraway lands and planets like Themyscira and Oa.

5 LEGO Worlds

LEGOs are for Building

The entire point and appeal of LEGO bricks is that you build stuff with them. In spite of that, there hasn’t actually been much in the way of overtly creative LEGO video games aside from, I suppose, LEGO Creator. The first earnest attempt at making a LEGO game of this nature in a hot minute was 2017’s LEGO Worlds, a proper LEGO sandbox game.

LEGO Worlds is built off of Traveller’s Tales’ LEGO game engine, so it looks and plays similarly to most of the licensed LEGO games. In addition to that basic framework, though, you have a variety of creative tools, such as a scanner for copying LEGO bricks and builds. Using collected Studs, you can unlock the various builds, vehicles, characters, and other miscellany and place them freely around the sandbox map. There are additional tools like a landscaping beam that lets you raise or lower the terrain and a copy and paste tool for duplicating and resizing objects.

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It’s not quite on the same scope as something like Minecraft, but LEGO Worlds is definitely the most ambitious creative LEGO game to date. It’s like a living version of one of those big LEGO tables with the stud-covered plate on top.

4 LEGO 2K Drive

The Intersection of Kart Racing and Real Racing

Everyone loves to make LEGO vehicles, from race cars to spaceships. There have been a few vehicle-focused LEGO games over the years, such as the aforementioned LEGO Racers, but these games had somewhat simplistic building systems combined with pretty basic racing gameplay. LEGO 2K Drive was an ambitious effort to escalate the art of LEGO-powered racing to the next level.

In LEGO 2K Drive, you can build your own LEGO vehicle from a little over 1,000 different composite pieces. It does need to start with a basic frame with wheels, though there are a few different frames to choose from, so you can at least establish a baseline of how large or long your car will be. Vehicles can have a transforming mechanic, switching to a boat when driving over water, so you can also make some pretty sharp wave-cutters as well.

Any vehicle you make can be driven in either single races or around the game’s open world. The races have weapons and power-ups like in LEGO Racers, but the actual car handling is more in line with real racing games, much like the regular 2K Drive.

3 LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga

A Galaxy of Franchising

There have been Star Wars-themed LEGO games as far back as 2005, releasing fairly consistently for each subsequent film. While these games were cute and fun to play co-op with a sibling, they were all pretty straightforward, linear games. In the late 2010s, though, around the release of Rise of Skywalker, Traveller’s Tales decided to take the limiters off and see how far they could push the LEGO Star Wars concept.

LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga was an entirely new LEGO depiction of all nine mainline Star Wars films, plus some nods to other miscellaneous films and shows on the side. To hold this gigantic saga of film, Skywalker Saga features a remarkably massive recreation of the Galaxy Far, Far Away, complete with explorable planets, notable locales from across the films, and even fully-traversable space via controllable ships like the Millennium Falcon.

Additionally, the game’s combat was overhauled compared to its predecessors. No longer are you just mindlessly mashing an attack button or shooting in a target’s general direction; Jedi and Sith have dedicated lightsaber combo systems, and Stormtroopers and other blaster-wielders use third-person over-the-shoulder shooting, creating combat that’s much more exciting while still retaining its inherent accessibility.

2 LEGO Dimensions

A Veritable Maelstrom of IPs

The early 2010s were the heyday of toys-to-life games, spurred forth by the whirlwind success of Skylanders. Considering “toys” is kind of LEGO’s whole shtick, it wasn’t particularly surprising that LEGO would try to cut a piece of that pie in LEGO Dimensions. What was surprising was the mind-blowing lengths to which that game went to draw in players, teaming up with IPs across the entertainment spectrum.

The premise of LEGO Dimensions is that LEGO Batman, LEGO Gandalf, and Wyldstyle from The LEGO Movie are crusading across the multiverse to battle an interdimensional baddie. You send them vehicles and equipment through the toy portal thing, scanning LEGO sets to manifest them in-game. In addition to that, though, scanning the game’s many expansion packs opened up extra levels in the main story and beyond, all of them based on one of over 30 different pop culture franchises.

The franchises represented in LEGO Dimensions include, but are not limited to, The Simpsons, Back to the Future, Portal, The Wizard of Oz, Doctor Who, Adventure Time, The Goonies, Ghostbusters, Sonic the Hedgehog, and exponentially more. It was quite possibly the most ambitious inter-franchise cooperation in all of gaming, at least until Fortnite released a few years later.

1 LEGO Horizon Adventures

An Impressive Production

I remember catching the initial reveal for LEGO Horizon Adventures along with my friends, and our collective reaction was a resounding… “Huh?” Horizon has become one of PlayStation’s tentpole franchises, but none of us were expecting it to be the first gaming IP to get its own standalone LEGO game. To LEGO and Sony’s credit, though, they committed to the vision, making it very ambitious by sheer virtue of simply existing.

LEGO Horizon Adventures presents a truncated version of Horizon Zero Dawn’s story, bringing back all of the original voice cast for Aloy and company and following the same general story beats while dialing down some of the violence and post-apocalyptic stuff in favor of a sillier, more upbeat depiction. What was particularly neat was that the game’s cutscenes use an animation style reminiscent of The LEGO Movie, with the characters moving like minifigs rather than just LEGO-shaped people as they do in other LEGO games.

The game also does a pretty excellent job of rendering all of Horizon’s signature mechanical creatures entirely in LEGO. Considering the complicated designs these creatures had in the source material, it was no small feat, making them look cohesive in the medium of LEGO bricks.