I’ll admit it, I’m an AFOL; an adult fan of LEGO. I spend far too much money on pieces of plastic and have a huge collection of modular buildings and Ideas sets on shelves in my living room. For me, it’s the building itself that I love, alongside the satisfaction of finishing sets and designing my own creations. With that in mind, you can imagine how disappointing most LEGO games have been for me over the years. There’s a lot of value in things like LEGO Star Wars, which allow you to experience other franchises through a different lens, but none of the games up to now have really delivered a true LEGO experience. It SHOULD be about building and designing – expressing your creativity through a limited selection of parts. The closest a LEGO game has come to the experience of freely building has been Builder’s Journey, but whilst it scratched the itch for a while it was both too brief and too linear to really give me the experience I wanted.
Thankfully, it seems that Clockstone – the developer behind LEGO’s latest game, Bricktales – took these ongoing criticisms on board. Whilst unconnected to Builder’s Journey, Bricktales follows a similar design philosophy and runs with the concept of a grand adventure punctuated by opportunities to build creatively.
Bricktales begins with your nameless minifig character receiving a letter from their Grandfather, asking them to come to the family’s amusement park. On arrival, you discover it in a state of disrepair and are swiftly tasked with finding happiness crystals to repair it. Your companion, a strangely-named space-exploring robot accompanies you through a portal to a variety of interesting and unique locations – each designed around a past or present LEGO theme. Each world is unlocked linearly, and you have to explore each one finding people to help, collectables, new movement abilities and bananas (the game’s main currency.) There is a lot of basic platforming here, with simple Metroidvania elements thrown in for good measure and heaps to see. The individual screens – rendered/built fully in LEGO and each built as its own “model” which you can rotate around – also lead you to what I would consider the meat of the game; building.
As you journey through jungles and castles the player often encounters obstacles in their way – gaps which need to be crossed and destroyed tools as examples. To overcome them you usually need to build something, whether that’s a copy of something else, a bridge, support for a wobbly platform or some sort of flying machine. These take place away from the world and give you a selection of pieces to use, making it part building challenge and part puzzle. These start simple, build quickly escalate to true tests of your physics knowledge. Building a bridge? It needs to be wide enough to cross but also stable, so you’ll need multiple supports and enough strength built from the connections between each brick. Building a flying machine? It requires you to include these particular parts which are a pain to include but also needs to be stable by itself and high enough that your character can fit inside and the propellor can get enough lift. These challenges went well beyond anything else LEGO has delivered before and each offered a unique and interesting challenge. Whilst Builder’s Journey began to play with these elements, Bricktales has managed to fully expand on them. They can get pretty tricky too, as you are usually limited to a wide array of different bricks. An early challenge gives you a few long plates for a bridge, but not quite enough, thus forcing you to think cleverly about how you can integrate smaller plates and bricks around the long ones to extend the length. Clockstone did a great job of balancing these challenges, with most giving you plenty of scope for tackling them in different ways whilst also limiting the number of elements you had to work with. Additionally, once a challenge is completed it appears in the world, showcasing your solutions as usable and active parts of the world.
Thankfully these sections have some well-considered controls on PC, clearly marked at all times on screen and allowing the freedom needed for working in a 3D space. Whilst I did have a few placement hiccups, it’s the best that I’ve seen this kind of system delivered and I was always able to place bricks where I desired eventually. I would have liked to have seen options for SNOT rotations – Stud Not On Top – but considering that the whole physics engine requires clear connections between bricks I can understand why this was left out.
Once completed, you also unlock sandbox mode for each challenge, allowing you to pull from your own unlocked brick collection to expand on your designs. I honestly can’t describe how good it felt to be building the world around me piece by piece, doing just enough initially within certain limits to pass the test, then going back with free reign to expand on it using my own creativity. Completing more challenges and discovering collectables further expands your (at first) limited brick collection, so I found myself revisiting past worlds later in the game to improve my builds more and more whenever I unlocked something I thought would fit well.
Talking unlockables, there is a hell of a lot to find. With the bananas you collect you can buy new colour palettes and pieces for your collection, alongside a variety of Minifigure pieces for your character. You can change your personal minifig whenever you want from the menu to fit the theme of the current world or just how you fancy looking. I found the sheer number of choices for player customisation impressive from the start, and as it expanded I began to experiment more and more with how I looked. Yes, some notable body parts are missing from the LEGO catalogue, but I still found myself recognising many iconic characters from LEGO past and present, and being able to cosplay a knock-off of Johnny Thunder from my childhood was an absolute blast.
Graphically I was also immediately impressed. Each world is rendered seamlessly and I often felt like I was genuinely looking at real LEGO. They’ve chosen a minimalist interface aesthetic, letting the LEGO itself do the talking and leaving the overall aesthetic very clear and clean. Even more impressively, the whole game ran like a dream on the highest settings – despite my rapidly ageing R9 200 series and i5 3750k. The sound design is excellent too, with understated music underpinning both the platforming and building sections. Sound effects are crisp and satisfying especially, with the clicking and snapping sounds produced while building being especially impressive. I would only criticise the lack of any meaningful dialogue sounds – you would expect some light wordless chatter or grunts in most LEGO games, yet in Bricktales there is only the “blub” of appearing text. I wasn’t expecting full voice acting, but something more characterful would have been appreciated.
Overall though, LEGO Bricktales is clearly the best LEGO game we’ve seen so far – if you’re looking for an experience akin to playing with real LEGO. The storyline is good enough to push the game forward, but the gameplay itself is a delight to experience. Whilst I preferred the building side, the platforming elements were decently fun in their own right and added just enough of a break between builds that I was ready for the next whenever it came. I can highly recommend Bricktales to fans of LEGO young and old – it’s a brick-built experience not to be missed.
Available on Nintendo Switch, Xbox, Playstation and PC
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