Inside Social Games

Yet another name has been added to the growing list of major companies making their way onto Facebook: LucasArts. With it, comes one of its premiere franchises, Indiana Jones. The app is LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues, but before you get too excited the tomb raiding archeologist doesn‘t quite live up to user expectations. At least not yet.

Ubisoft, PopCap, USA Networks, and Konami have all been busy building for Facebook and Facebook Connect. However, these companies have created titles or game portals that were fun in and of themselves, or at least tried to be. And their integration with Facebook added simple social components, with the exception of Ubisoft who designed TickTock so it specifically required social play — the games were intended to see how social features could work, and they were done well. Unfortunately for Indie, the same can not be said.

Bluntly put, this app feels like nothing more than a quickly thrown together “game” meant to garner a little bit of extra advertising for the LEGO Indiana Jones series. Were it not for the name of the title, it wouldn’t even have the 27,000 monthly active users it currently does.

When the game is first loaded up, it looks fantastic, carrying that LEGO art style the series is known for. Players jump in, and are prompted to create an avatar. Okay, sounds cool thus far — everyone likes customizing avatars. You can change the head, body, and legs to something worn by one of the Indiana Jones characters or even George Lucas himself. It’s simple, yes, but it’s LEGO. How much customization can you do with a LEGO person? Right? Once you finish, you save the avatar, then get prompted with the question about whether you want to post it to your feed. All fairly standard.

This is where the real game starts! Right…? Nope, you get to see your avatar and Indie standing on a bunch of crates that make up the first scene from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. That’s it! That is all this game is! Sure, you can invite more friends and they stand still in the scene too, and if you invite enough you get a new scene from the movie, but there is nothing else to do.

There have been a lot of bad games on Facebook, this much is true, but never before has one been so… anticlimactic. Change three things! Look, you have a custom avatar! Now tell all your friends about our “awesome” game and advertise for us.

Maybe that’s just the point of the game — and we suppose that’s okay. But it seems like a real social game built with this theme would be a far more compelling advertisement for the franchise.