f you attended a Star Wars convention and saw someone wearing stormtrooper armor, you wouldn’t think twice about it. After all, the ratio of humans to stormtroopers is nearly even. However, if you saw a stormtrooper dressed in Indiana Jones clothing, you’d likely learn over to your friend and say, “that dude has serious issues” or “get me out of here, I don’t feel comfortable anymore.” This is the problem that LEGO Indiana Jones runs into. Even with a fedora and a furious crack of the whip accompanying each battle, you cannot shake the feeling that you are actually playing LEGO Star Wars with an Indiana Jones skin slapped on top of it, and not a true Indiana Jones game.

With that said, the gameplay pulled from a galaxy far, far away remains largely entertaining. I always get excited when I see a pile of bricks that need to be assembled into a contraption, and the sound of LEGO studs spilling onto the floor is music to my ears. Like its science fiction predecessors, the replay component in LEGO Indy is high, as you are encouraged to play levels again with different characters to reach new areas and secrets.

To capture the adventurous tone of the movies, combat has been scaled back to give way for more puzzle and platforming sections. Figuring out how to crack open a tomb fits the profile of the famed archeologist, but most of the puzzles linked to a feat like this are either painfully simple or overly tedious. Some even require extensive platforming. With the perspective misleading you most of the time, and your characters’ jump animations being incredibly hard to read, many jumps are blind leaps of faith– something that worked for Indy in the films, but not for gamers who want to keep their controllers in one piece. Of course, you have unlimited lives, but if you are trying to unlock everything in a level, one missed jump can lead to you restarting the stage.

All three of the Indiana Jones films are flush with unforgettable moments. This game butchers most of them. The boulder evasion is an absolute mess, the mine cart sequence is incredibly boring, and all of the vehicle-based segments are poorly constructed. The best parts of the movies are oddly the worst parts of this game.

As much as I enjoyed playing as Indiana Jones and his father, I really couldn’t find too many other characters that I actually wanted to suit up as. Do you pick another faceless German, some old dude, or the most annoying female of all time, Willie? It’s not like Star Wars or Batman where every character is cool. I mostly wanted to play as Indy.

The magic just isn’t here. Repeating the success of Star Wars with a radically different license requires more than Star Wars as a foundation. It really never finds Indiana Jones’ pulse, and ends up being somewhat of a mess, albeit a moderately fun one.