While I might not like real LEGO, though, I certainly like virtual LEGO. The first LEGO video game, LEGO Star Wars, arrived as an absolute breath of fresh air at a time when far too many games were taking themselves far too seriously. Its simple but effective gameplay, clever structure, beautifully conceived graphics style and best of all endless wit provided the perfect relief from the strain of bending our brains to follow ridiculously over-convoluted stories populated by preposterously over-wrought characters controlled in increasingly over-complicated ways.

And now LEGO Indiana Jones has also arrived at just the right time to bring another welcome dose of shallowness, silliness and total unrealism to our gaming lives. Even if this Fedora-wearing LEGO dose isn't quite as satisfying as the Star Wars one.

On the surface there seems no clear reason why the Indy LEGO game should be any less gratifying than the Star Wars LEGO ones. After all, pretty much all of the same elements are in place: Timeless movie characters remolded cutely into LEGO - check. A trio of blockbuster films to base levels of the game around: check. A generally tidy third-person perspective with lots of undemanding puzzles to solve: check. Loads of collectable and unlockable items to keep you coming back for more: check. The ability to replay levels using a wide selection of characters not available during first play-through: check.

But the simple truth is that while these - and other - parts of LEGO Star Wars' considerable attraction are physically present in LEGO Indiana Jones, they aren't held together by quite as much flair and imagination.

It's hard to put your finger on exactly why this is the case. In fact, to some extent you might argue that the ‘fault’ lies more with the Indiana Jones subject matter than the actual game mechanics. For instance, in my humble opinion only two or three characters from the Indiana Jones film series are really interesting, distinctive and memorable enough to provide immediate and easy flavour to a comedy game environment, whereas there are countless unforgettable people, aliens and robots to play around with/poke fun at in the Star Wars universe.

On a similar note, all the Indiana Jones films take place very much on Earth, with only human protagonists involved, while Star Wars provides a far more varied set of locations and species for the Traveller's Tales designers and story writers to get their parodying teeth into.

Finally, it’s a simple fact that I’m not as familiar with the Indiana Jones films as I am with the Star Wars ones, making it entirely possible that some of the games subtler 'in jokes' are lost on me simply because I can't remember the section of film they refer to.

Of course, if you're a die-hard Indy anorak, then this last comment doesn't apply to you. But I'm pretty confident that there will generally be less people with a truly deep knowledge of the Indy films than there are for the Star Wars series.

Perhaps because of some of the film source shortcomings I've just been through, it's only very occasionally that any true moments of laugh-out-loud humour shine through in LEGO Indiana Jones. And even gentle chuckles feel a little few and far between. Even the cut-scenes only generally raise a gentle smile, for heaven's sake, while practically all of these in the original Star Wars LEGO game were absolutely hilarious.

It's as if the lack of truly varied and distinctive game fodder in the Indy movies has put something of a dampener on Traveller's Tales’ wit levels.

As reinforcement for this point, the most flat-out funny moments in the game are tellingly mostly those that occur when you find the secret Star Wars characters hidden within the some of the game's levels.

The general lack of real invention and humour in the game follows through to some of the level design too, with some levels – particularly later in the game - starting to feel forced and over-stretched to the point that they almost become a bit of a drudge in a way that simply never occurred in LEGO Star Wars.

As a result, the thinness of the LEGO games' really pretty basic game mechanics starts to show through from time to time.

Yet another contextual point that affects LEGO Indy is the fact that it's not the first LEGO game we've played. And so it doesn't enjoy the same sort of novelty value appeal that LEGO Star Wars did.

At the risk of labouring the negatives about this game to an unfair extent, there are one or two gameplay 'glitches' that occasionally frustrate, too. The age-old problem of repeatedly respawning in a position where I immediately die again (AKA the Jet Set Willy effect) happened to me on numerous occasions, though you can usually just about get round this by quickly changing between your two characters the second your dying character respawns.

I also frequently struggled to get up ladders, and felt that the collision detection between my characters and lethal parts of the environment - especially spears - wasn't quite as accurate as I'd have liked, leading to a few unfair-looking deaths.

Right, that’s quite enough miserableness for one review. Now I should say that all the griping above merely explains why I only enjoyed LEGO Indiana Jones rather than loving it like I do LEGO Star Wars. I'm certainly not saying LEGO Indy is a bad game at all.

For starters, one or two of the puzzles you have to crack - especially to get 'extras' like mail deliveries or treasure chests - are surprisingly challenging, even though the game overall is really quite easy.

Also, the game's structure is every bit as clever at inspiring repeat playthroughs as it was in the Star Wars game, with the Barnett College location working even better than the Cantina in LEGO Star Wars as a central hub for you to explore the rest of the game from.

The inclusion of extra unlockable characters and all manner of helpful cheats - such as an 'Artifact finder' that points you in the direction of all hidden artefacts on every level - as rewards for more in-depth playing also keep you coming back to the game way after you've completed the campaign missions for the first time.

Another positive point in LEGO Indy's favour is that I generally found its Xbox 360 Achievement system providing better excuses than the achievements used in LEGO Star Wars to play the game in different ways - and for much longer than you might without them.

There's still room for improvement in the achievement department; a few of the 'secret' achievements on offer are rather pointless and easy to get, such as the 20pts for using the Indy's Dad character to hit Indy, and the other 20 points you get for getting Indy to hit his dad! Also, it would have been nice if some of the 'repetition' achievements, such as the one for using the Mechanic ability 50 times, carried visible counters so you could see how close you were getting to them.

Before non-gamerscore obsessives start nodding off over their joysticks, though, it's probably best I move swiftly on to the single most important thing that makes LEGO Indy worth checking out: namely the fact that despite its relatively basic game mechanics and only gentle humour levels, LEGO Indiana Jones is only very seldom anything less than great fun. Especially if you can get a mate round to play the game in two-man co-op mode.

The shiny, blocky graphics style, the lovely ‘click’ sound effect as your characters build LEGO machines, the bizarre irresistibility of collecting the endless coins thrown out every time you destroy an enemy or piece of scenery… All these factors and countless more besides are perfect, relaxing foils for the frequently exhausting intensity found in most corners of the gaming world – as well as helping to create a genuinely ‘family’ game you can play alongside your kids which, for once, isn’t total shit.

Not that first impressions bode well. For the gameplay ‘movie’ that plays if you don’t select a menu option looks bloody awful – as if it’s been filmed off a 20in TV using an S-VHS camcorder.

Happily this video proves not to be illustrative of the picture quality in general. There is, for instance, a real crispness to the HD polish worn by pretty much everything in the game - characters and backdrops alike. The entire gaming world also seems to glimmer and shine in that wonderfully plasticky way you get with new LEGO sets, and this effect alone is enough to keep at least a half smile permanently playing across your lips.

The game's colour palette is suitably vibrant too, with just the sort of full-on tones you'd expect to find in a LEGO set as opposed to the real world.

The cut-scenes are beautifully rendered and designed for the most part, meanwhile, and although in-game animations are far from the smoothest I've seen, this slightly staccato style seems as consistent with the whole LEGO feel as the fact that some aspects of the character and scenery design are deliberately 'blocky'.

In fact, the style and consistency of the LEGO graphics means that one or two of the evocations of Indy film locations and characters even seem to possess a little playful soul, depending on how much you love the Indy films and, probably, on how much you've had to drink.

If this was a game that permitted me to be miserable, I might moan about the lack of camera flexibility caused by the game's pretty much side-on view of the action. Plus there are the occasional collision detection issues mentioned in the gameplay section, and every now and then I found myself getting stuck behind scenery.

I even experienced a bizarre glitch where the hair of one of the female characters suddenly and momentarily disappeared every time I turned them so that their back was to the screen, with the hair then ‘zooming in’ onto their head from a king-sized start point in the image foreground!

Last and worst, though, is some of the most dismal 'screen tearing' I've ever seen in a next-gen video game. This can take the form of a simple horizontal 'tear' in the picture as you scroll left or right, particularly if there's quite a lot of moving graphical information to handle. But sometimes horizontal graphics glitches just appear for little apparent reason and slide up and down the picture without so much as a by your leave.

If you want to see what I'm talking about, check out the Battle On The Bridge level, where you emerge from the flooding caves onto a cliff face. As well as the picture tearing visibly as you move left or right, every few seconds one of the floating interference lines appears, wanders around a bit to spoil the atmosphere, and then buggers off again.

Such a glitch would be annoying in any game, but it's especially aggravating in LEGO Indy's case because it puts up a wall between you and the game's perfectly formed plastic world.

To be fair, Travellers' Tales are aware of the problem, and have included an in-game 'fix' in the options menus called 'V-Sync'. If you turn this on, the sheering and floating line problems disappear. However, as the feature drops the frame rate to 30fps from the normal 60fps, suddenly motion in the picture looks distractingly staccato and generally less distinct and cartoonlike, to the extent that we quickly decided to put up with the shearing problem instead...

In fact, the addition of the V-Sync option if anything merely underlines the thought that really the screen tear shouldn't be there at all on a game of LEGO Indy's relatively unsophisticated graphical level.

Still, the fact is that LEGO Indy is so likeable as a game that I actually found that I’d rather deliberately try and pretend that the latest glitch hadn’t happened rather than have it sully my enjoyment of what I was doing.

The old-school tinkle of the coins as you collect them, the satisfying click of all the little bits of LEGO as you put them together and the cute ‘pop’ as an enemy ‘explodes’ into little LEGO chunks all help reinforce the game’s charming atmosphere, too.

Fans of hardcore action games might find the lack of ‘meat’ to the game’s soundtrack annoying, especially when it comes to weapons fire, but frankly if you want that sort of thing I’d suggest you boot up Halo 3 again.

The only genuine charges I can level at LEGO Indy’s soundtrack are that a) there’s not really much effects placement in the surround channel, and b) some of the main effects coming from the centre speaker sound strangely lo-fi, as if they’ve been recorded using an old tape recorder, and so they stand out like a sore thumb against the smoothness of the rest of the sound mix.

Even a simple league table system where you could compare the final amount of coins collected for each level would have added something to the game. But no; LEGO Indy never escapes the confines of your Xbox, and is the poorer for it.