LEGO Island 2

LEGO Island 2 is making its way to the GameBoy Advance towards the end of this month courtesy of Silicon Dreams, and we got our hands on a rare pre-production copy of the game today. On the GameBoy that means an outsized cartridge with two chunks of green PCB spliced on to the end in a fragile-looking manner. Costing around $300 and sticking several inches past the top of your machine, it all looks very Heath Robinson. Needless to say there's not many of them around, so we had to return our copy within a day or risk being turned into a pumpkin. Probably.

The game itself is obviously aimed at kids, but the dialogue is very funny at times, including the inevitable "all your base" reference, which is sure to fly straight over the heads of most 10 year olds. At the heart of the game is a hand-held RPG-style quest, and your time is spent wandering around the eponymous plastic islands, chatting with the locals and trying to track down the missing pages of the Constructopaedia, which was stolen by the evil Brickster as he escaped from jail. These pages can then be used by the locals to recover the buildings which Brickster destroyed, ranging from houses to hospitals, radio stations and even a skate park for those of you with a Tony Hawk fetish.

At times the whole thing is downright surreal, with a whole host of daft mini-games ranging from "whack a bot" and medieval jousting to a Parappa-style bongo playing sequence and a diving game which sees you recovering bricks from a collapsed LEGO bridge while dodging stingrays, jellyfish and sharks. Unfortunately most of these are really far too easy for an adult audience (I got gold medals on most of them first time round), which is a shame because the rest of the game is actually quite entertaining. At the end of the day it's very much a kids title, but if the young 'uns leave their copy lying around you might want to take a peek too.