Building LEGO in LEGO Bricktales is one of the best ways to spend a day. It’s immensely satisfying to watch a collection of plastic bricks come together to form a grand design in a manner. That digital representations haven’t always been able to match. Therefore, LEGO Bricktales takes a completely different approach from the majority of previous LEGO games. Which have instead found popularity as comical action-platformers with tie-ins from third parties. It does away with the well-known characters and cooperative combat in favor of a unique narrative and building-based puzzles. Even while battling the camera or accomplishing perplexing mission goals, it’s close like building LEGOs.
Overview
Typically, the eponymous construction toy is not the main focus of a Lego game. Lego A Builder’s Journey utilized the brick-building toys to tell a moving tale. And a sizable library of Traveller’s Tales games have been built on crossovers with many licensed franchises. These games turn LOTR and Marvel characters into hilarious action-platformers. Lego Bricktales amazingly mimics the feeling of manipulating Lego bricks. In this approach, Lego Bricktales performs the role of a STEM toy by imparting fundamental engineering concepts in an entertaining and captivating manner, just like real Lego bricks. By putting it in a virtual environment like this, you can personally and tactilely test how well your hard work holds up under pressure. In a way that previous games haven’t quite managed to convey, you can sense the solidity of the interlocking brick mechanism.
Bricktales focuses on construction in five Lego-themed worlds with physics-based building puzzles. The Lego blocks behave exactly as a skilled builder would expect due to the amazing physics system. Every time you finish a weight-bearing project, test it by dropping something or having a robot walk on it. The components will just fall apart if support struts weren’t added to strengthen it. One spacer too high on a step could cause the building to collapse with adequate fall momentum.
Character in LEGO Bricktales
In LEGO Bricktales, you play as a brick character entrusted with restoring power to your eccentric grandfather’s home theme park before it permanently closed. Imagine Doc Brown from Back to the Future, except Grandpa has constructed a gateway to take you to exotic locations rather than a modified DeLorean. Your objective is to assist the residents in a few different biomes and gather Happiness Crystals, which can utilize to power the theme park’s attractions. When you’re trying to restore Grandpa’s park to its former splendor, helping an archeologist explore a jungle temple, discovering a long-lost pirate ship, and healing a country full of poisoned peasants are all in a day’s work.
When viewed from a distance, each level in LEGO Bricktales made to resemble a finely detailed diorama, similar to the Captain Toad stages in Super Mario 3D World. There is no platforming or combat to be obtained here, in contrast to many of the most well-known LEGO games. Instead, LEGO Bricktales blends puzzle-solving and adventure for a more grounded approach. As grounded as entering a gateway to discover electricity generation in medieval or ancient Egypt.
To solve one of these puzzles, build a LEGO stairs, lookout tower, or amusement park attraction. Building bridges to get characters across gaps is a common solution to problems in LEGO Bricktales. Which is not entirely surprising given that developer ClockStone is best known for the Bridge Constructor series. You complete this step brick by brick, just as you would with real LEGO sets.
These LEGO constructions may be really meditative to build
Building these masterpieces may be extremely calm, much like in real life. Each of these puzzles contains a finite quantity of bricks in a variety of shapes. As well as requirements that fulfilled, such as height and breadth restrictions; it is not an open sandbox. Bridges strengthened and durable, paths should open, and everything that hangs in the air needs to correctly balance because physics and common sense apply in this situation. You must perform a test run on any creation before it finished to ensure that it won’t crumble beneath the weight of it test subjects (who happen to be adorable robots).
The most appealing parts of LEGO Bricktales can also be its most problematic ones. Meeting the goals can occasionally be more unpleasant than enjoyable, but putting together a difficult structure and then seeing it in use as planned is tremendously rewarding. I once spent over an hour creating and rebuilding a fire escape just to witness the test robots continually fall to the ground as my stairs fell apart. It’s not always obvious why something you’ve made isn’t operating properly. You can be lacking a single reinforcement piece, or the entire construction might simply be weak. If the camera controls were better, it would be simpler to determine the solution, but as it stands, I constantly felt like I was battling with them to get a better viewing angle.
Camera in LEGO Bricktales
In both the building and exploration portions of LEGO Bricktales, the camera is without a doubt my biggest pet peeve. The latter requires you to entirely pause the action in order to zoom out and acquire a bird’s eye view of the scene. Because you cannot move and operate the camera simultaneously. Because of this, searching for secret crevices and corners might occasionally feel like a work. Which is undesirable because LEGO Bricktales pushes you to venture off the usual route in order to acquire collectibles. While creating, you thankfully have greater control. Though it can still be challenging to arrange the components as you see fit and to clearly see what’s going wrong.
Mode
There isn’t really a reason to go back and rebuild a building puzzle after you’ve finished it in sandbox mode. Which loosens the restrictions and allows you to use more components in different colors and patterns. Instead of the same selection of colorful basic pieces repeatedly, I wish there had been more innovation and oddity on display in these challenges the first time around. To be fair, the puzzles reflect the color palette of the surroundings. So it’s not odd to encounter a raft on the beach that is kept together by brown bits that depict slabs of wood. Not every puzzle must be made of unusual materials and have unicorn rainbow aesthetics. But more variation would have been welcome.
Despite this, it’s simple to ignore these irritations and focus solely on the adventure. After gaining new powers, you can return to old locales to find previously inaccessible treasures. Like previous LEGO games, it promotes exploration, and the collectible animals. Such as ladybugs, hermit crabs, rabbits, and so forth, provide ample incentive to return to well-worn paths. The story takes 12 to 15 hours to conclude and is full with passion, humor, and clever references. The game plays well on Steam Deck, and cloud saves made the adventure more fun.
Verdict
LEGO Bricktales is a wonderful journey that gives new life to what a LEGO game can be. So it’s a shame that it sometimes gets in its own way. Building brick constructions on the screen is almost as enjoyable as doing so in real life. And even when I was irritated by the camera’s restricted functionality or a challenging objective. I still found myself grinning and pumping my fist as I made progress. The licensed LEGO adventure games will always have a place, but LEGO Bricktales is a nice change of pace that I’d like to see more geometry dash of.
