Welcome to our review of Lego Bricktales, your one stop shop to play the Lego brickbuilding as a videogame.
In Lego Bricktales, discover an innovative brick-by-brick building mechanic to design puzzle solutions from your own imagination. See your creations brought to life in a beautiful LEGO world where every problem has a constructive resolution. Embark on an epic adventure across a world of beautiful LEGO diorama biomes crafted brick by brick as you search for inspiration to help your grandfather reinvigorate his rundown amusement park with your little robot buddy in tow. Your journey will take you to the deepest jungle, sun-drenched deserts, a bustling city corner, a towering medieval castle, and tropical Caribbean islands. Help the minifigures of these worlds by solving puzzles and unlock new skills throughout the story to further explore these worlds and uncover the many secrets and mysteries they contain.
From purely aesthetic creations, such as a market stand or music box, up to functional physics-based puzzles like building a crane or gyrocopter – each diorama offers a variety of construction spots with the freedom of intuitive brick-by-brick building. In each spot you are given a set of bricks and it’s up to you to figure out a unique build that will work. On top of specific puzzles and quests, there are additional builds in the amusement park so you can customize the rides to make them your own!
Your grandfather, a genius inventor, has called you for help! His beloved amusement park is about to close as the mayor is threatening to shut everything down and seize the land if the necessary repairs aren’t made to bring it up to code. With the help of your powerful little robot buddy, you can restore it using a mysterious device based on alien technology. As a source of power, the device needs happiness crystals, which you can harvest by making people happy and solving their problems. With the aid of a portal, travel to different locations all around the world to help people and collect their happiness crystals. Strap in for the ultimate building adventure and save your grandfather’s amusement park!
A globetrotting LEGO adventure: Experience a whimsical and epic adventure around the world, packed with charming dialogue and fun secrets to unravel. Explore five varied story world biomes and the amusement park hub, all fully built out of LEGO bricks. Discover the most intuitive brick-by-brick building in a LEGO video game, as you see your creations come to life in a three-dimensional world.
Test your skills with varied puzzles: Different types of puzzles will test your building skills. Use your engineering brain in functional physics-based puzzles to build a bridge for a digger to get across a river, put your designer hat on to build a stunning new throne for the King, or customize the rides in the amusement park. Master your builds in Sandbox Mode: Unlock the Sandbox Mode upon completing a construction spot, then you go back in and improve your build with a huge selection of additional bricks from different themes. Find collectables in the different dioramas and use them to buy cool new items for your wardrobe or new brick color sets for the sandbox mode. Create your own minifigure character from a huge selection of parts and unlock more options inspired by the worlds you visit as you progress through the story.
Lego Bricktales is very unlike the usual witty LEGO games as it is a more realistic building endeavor. The entire game has its typical storyline of saving your grandpa. But the progress is obtained by virtually placing bricks in the right place. From building stairs in very specific ways to mending broken pipes to whatever thing you can imagine. I had to make battery packs that in return were used to power up a device later in the same story/field.
I use field but maybe I should say sandbox? The levels are more or less small sandboxes on their own, each with several little building puzzles that will in turn unlock the next part of the game. In itself, the idea behind Lego Bricktales is smart and actually very late to the story. I would just have liked the entire mechanics to be a little easier. For a game oddly directed at the younger audience but advised to be 12+ is kind of contradictory. If the entire placing of bricks had been easier or should I say snappier, this would have been a much better game.
Mind you this is not a bad game or anything, it just has some very precise controls and in my first hour alone, I think I cussed like twice out loud that it was not placing the brick where I wanted. Both times with smaller bricks. I do feel that this is a fun game to have, but it is a very niche video game really, because really, if I wanted to build something out of LEGO, would I not be better off just buying a set?
In conclusion, LEGO Bricktales is fun, yet overly precise in its use and strangely aimed at a higher age range than you’d expect.
