Lego games often don’t focus on their actual construction toy names. A huge library of Traveler’s Tales games has been built upon crossover games with multiple licensed franchises, turning properties like The Lord of the Rings and Marvel superheroes into superheroes. action packed, and Lego A Builder’s Journey uses brick-built toys to tell a heartfelt story. Lego games don’t usually feel like actually playing with Lego bricks, but Lego Bricktales really does with incredible precision.
Bricktales is all about building, taking you to five Lego-themed worlds and introducing you to a series of physics-based building puzzles. The underlying physics of the whole thing is impressive, as the Lego bricks actually work the way any experienced bricklayer would expect. Whenever you complete a project that requires weight bearing, you’ll need to test it with a falling object or a small robot crossing your construction to make sure it’s holding up. If you don’t reinforce it with support struts, the pieces will just fall off. Even elements such as a ladder that is too high can generate enough fall momentum to break the structure.
In that way, Lego Bricktales works like a STEM toy, teaching some basic engineering principles in a fun and engaging way, just like actual Lego bricks. Putting it in a virtual space like this means you can stress test the results of your hard work in a way that feels personal and tactile. You can feel the physics of the interlocking brick system in a way that other games have not yet captured. It is gratifying to walk up a set of stairs of your own design, realizing your own patterns and even your mistakes. And once you’ve completed the building challenge, you’ll unlock a free-to-play mode that lets you use additional decorative elements to make structures look awesome. As you progress through a biome, you’ll be surrounded by your own brick-built functional artworks, use them to traverse environments.
Puzzles can be difficult. I’m no engineer, but I’ve imagined myself adept at building Legos, and sometimes I’ll discover the limits of my own skills. The difficulty becomes unique, requiring you to do increasingly complex builds with more limited toolkits. Learning to do with the economy of bricks is a test of skill but all of that is much more satisfying when you put them together. My scariest challenges revolve around the pendulums, as they will actually account for the balance. Those are often trial-and-error, as I can’t feel the weight of the pieces in my hand, but they’re also some of the most rewarding for a stellar finish.
Lego Bricktales doesn’t use licensed attributes like Batman or The Lord of the Rings, although it does borrow the playful spirit TT Games established in those games. The dialogue is often funny, clever and interesting, sometimes with small jokes about the Lego bricks themselves.
Instead, these are classic biomes that you can find in a crate of Lego bricks, with themes like Jungle or Desert. Each biome is attended by villagers, with some simple puzzles about the environment and navigation to overcome the building challenges. Your ultimate goal is to make everyone happy, thereby collecting a special brick and taking it home, where it helps power your growing amusement park. The theme park serves as your reward for completing each biome, allowing you to craft parts of different games. These challenges are usually easier than the more complex construction challenges, as they mostly just require you to decorate elements like the roller coaster.
Construction tools can feel daunting, especially at first as you learn to compensate for their complexity. Pieces will often stick to places you didn’t mean to put them in, and even when trying to gently push a piece into place, it will sometimes pop out all over the construction area. And while there are many challenges in the construction, from helicopters and drones to recreating a statue, some are repetitive. There are only so many times you may be asked to build a bridge or a set of stairs.
Exhibition room
Virtual tools also suffer from some of the limitations of the medium itself, as even a very well-crafted virtual construction tool cannot fully reproduce the dexterity and flexibility of table use. your hand. For example, in real life, holding a device with one hand while attaching another to the bottom is second nature. In Bricktales, since you only manipulate one brick at a time, you need to build from the bottom up – or else take into account gravity by attaching a makeshift piece to hold another brick in place. . There is no option to hover a piece in the air while you grab another piece to hold it tight. It’s a small thing, but it’s just enough to keep the experience from feeling like a perfect imitation.
However, the slightly more imperfect Lego brick construction still means it’s near perfect, and that’s impressive. While some of the building challenges feel repetitive and the controls can be hard to come by, it’s a great concept well executed and pays homage to a classic toy. Lego Bricktales sets a new paradigm for what a Lego game can be, and I’d love to see developer Clockstone build on it even more.
