There's a term that annoys me a little: "kiddie game”. To some, the term itself is a tautology, as it's seemingly a ‘kiddie' pursuit to even play games in the first place, eschewing all those ‘adult' responsibilities like work and rent and crap. So when people look at the LEGO video games and immediately dismiss them as ‘kiddie games' I can see where they're coming from. After all, LEGO itself is pretty much the toy of choice for every child with a penchant for snapping two blocks together and calling it a building. Combine this with super geek franchises such as Star Wars and Indiana Jones, and you're forgiven for thinking that only children under twelve and 39 year old man-boys will get any enjoyment out of these games.

However, to brand these games so is to miss a lot of their depth. Sure, snapping LEGO together is a fairly kiddie (and expensive) pastime, but the gaming iterations, brought to you by Traveller's Tales, are infinitely more complex and definitely not as ‘kiddie' as some might think. Nope, there's, like, button presses involved and, like, jumping and stuff...

All jokes aside, if you've played the LEGO Star Wars games then you'll feel right at home with LEGO Indiana Jones. Each of the first three movies (they obviously didn't have time to include the latest film) is broken up into six distinct chapters – each themed around a particular act in the movie. Some creative liberties have definitely been taken here – for example, we're fairly certain that Indy didn't need to actually assemble any cars to help him escape in the movies – but by and large, even if you haven't watched the films in a while, that old buzz of nostalgia will fire up as you relive moments from these classic films.

The first difference between LEGO Indy and LSW is in the environments. Indy's levels seem much more organic, with jungle textures, city environs and more realistic layouts. The LEGO parts in the level do stand out more, but this then makes it easier to tell which parts of a level can be destroyed in order to a) collect those ubiquitous LEGO studs and b) discover a secret or uncover a building block to help solve a puzzle and move on to the next area.

LEGO Indy is a much more sedate experience than LSW. Gone are the lightsaber duels, laser fights and Force shenanigans. Indeed, the humans of the Indiana Jones universe are much more... boring. Traveller's Tales has solved this by including many objects in levels that can be used by all of the characters – these include shovels (used to dig up relics, hidden pieces and so on), wrenches (which are needed to fix broken machinery), and weapons (the bazooka is particularly useful for destroying metal objects).

In addition to these useable tools, several characters have special abilities; female characters are apparently a lot bouncier and can jump higher than males, and short characters can access the small tunnels found in some levels. There are a couple of other special abilities, such as being able to translate hieroglyphics and activate weird statue things, which helps elongate the game time needed to find everything in each level.

Both Free Play and Story Mode are available once you've passed the game. If you want to find absolutely everything – including hidden Star Wars characters – then it will take a detailed second playthrough to do so. We're not absolutely certain that this is as fun as it was for LSW, as there's a distinct feeling of déjà vu when playing through LEGO Indy, more to do with the structure of the game than the theme. The smash-everything-to-reveal-building-blocks-to-make-the-thing-you-need-to-progress style of gameplay is also a bit too thick in this one, and we really hope that the developers mix things up for the next game in the series, LEGO Batman.

As I mentioned at the top of this review, the ‘kiddie' description is not completely appropriate because some of the puzzles are actually quite complex and require lots of character-swapping and precise platforming. At the same time, Traveller's Tales has really upped the cute factor, to the point where violent scenes from the movies have been reduced to fairly weak parodies. Some people might find these scenes funny, but I didn't. Sorry.

You also can't help but notice that, well, the characters from Indiana Jones just aren't as cool as the Star Wars characters, nor are there enough of them. Let's see, there's Indy and... umm... well, that little annoying kid from Temple of Doom and... uh... all the female love interests... I guess. But unless you're a die-hard fan of the Indy movies you've probably only got a cursory memory of the characters. This lack of iconic and distinct characters, I believe, makes LEGO Indy weaker than the Star Wars games.

The game is also fairly bug-ridden, and we suspect that its release may have been rushed to ride on the back of The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Only one bug is game-breaking, freezing the game sometimes when you turn on the VSync option (to eliminate the rather glaring screen tears). This then requires a reboot and a loss of your level progress.

Other glitches relate to character spawns and the fixed camera. Sometimes, when I died, my character would spawn right at the edge of the cliff in a never-ending circle of death – so I had to quit that chapter and start again. The fixed camera is troublesome because for some reason there's a distinct lack of depth perception, making it hard to tell where your character will land. Faint shadows help a little bit, but more often than not the act of jumping to a platform is much more difficult than it should be.

While we're having a grump, we may as well harp on about the lack of online co-op. Part of what makes these LEGO games so much fun is the ability to play with another person. Quite frankly, the total lack of any kind of online multiplayer is just not acceptable (as the Super Nanny would say) and one can only wonder at the possible reasons for its omission. Perhaps a super-all-in one Lego Indy including the fourth movie will miracously appear in time for Christmas?