LEGO Bricktales review

The LEGO games that poke gentle fun at the biggest franchises in the world are some of the most popular, whether that’s Marvel, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or Jurassic Park. They allow you to live out your fantasies in brick form, giving you the tools to play around with your favourite characters and worlds from a wide range of properties. One thing they’ve never done is provide you with the freedom to build, not properly at least, however, LEGO Bricktales does just that.

Sure, you hold a button in to automatically build a bridge or a staircase, a spaceship or a truck. Maybe the Ewoks need a cannon to fend of the Stormtroopers on Yavin 4, or Hammond prompts you to build a new paddock for the escaped Velociraptors. LEGO Bricktales finally gives you that feeling of creative freedom by letting you build, but doing so with fewer boundaries. It’s a wonderful feeling, somewhat recreating that childhood joy of making something with LEGO bricks however you want, without the linear structures that couldn’t be stepped out of in the various TT Games’ releases.

For example, in one of the missions while exploring the jungle in LEGO Bricktales, I had to build a chair that attached to a zipline in order to rescue someone following a plane crash. With a select amount of pieces, I fashioned a seat that not only fitted the person, but had to be secure, as well as fit within the the space I was provided to do so. Whenever you have to build anything, you enter an empty space with the pieces of LEGO you’re given, as well as a few instructions. Then, you’re given free reign to build how you please.

Building a bridge might seem easy, but you can’t build with more than three pieces on top of each other, and it needs to be supported or at least secure so that when you test it, the robot can make it across the two platforms without it crashing into a heap of bricks and pieces. These sections are where you do the most of your head-scratching, but making what is required of you is for the most part, a lot of fun. My main issue with some of these segments is how finicky it can be, especially using a controller.

Moving certain bricks underneath another from specific camera angles is awkward. It can take a lot of manipulating the viewpoints to place pieces exactly where you want, and when you’re struggling with a build, it’s something you could do without. It takes a while to get to grips with the camera movement, but the building itself is actually quite straightforward. What LEGO Bricktales does so well is mix these building moments with exploration. You’re not given huge areas to freely move around in, rather detailed dioramas that move around much like Fez, or those Toad levels in Super Mario 3D World.

Puzzles don’t solely revolve around building either. Clockstone has thrown in some other headscratchers to coincide with the construction process, and they’re difficult enough to test your patience. One of these puzzles saw me turn various valves to move walls that led me to four beacons that needed lighting. With multiple valves, four beacons, and various entry points, it was a nice distraction from the build process. It feels as though LEGO Bricktales isn’t solely aimed at children. It is for those of us that grew up building with LEGO, and that nostalgic twang helped to keep me hooked.

LEGO Bricktales is gorgeous, with each of the biomes crafted beautifully using digital LEGO pieces. They all look like they’ve been faithfully constructed with the world’s biggest toybox filled with LEGO, and having a gentle tale at its heart makes you want to help your Grandpa keep his amusement park alive before the mayor shuts it down. Along with the help of Rusty, your trusty robot sidekick, you must travel across the five zones and help those in need to earn Happiness Crystals to rebuild and save the park.

It’s a simple premise, but it works. It’s nice to have such a pleasant story act as the backdrop for the intricate, physic-based brick dilemmas you have to solve. While trying to earn the Happiness Crystals, you’ve also got the freedom to find secret chests containing bananas, popsicles, or whatever coin replacement exists in each biome, which in turn helps you to buy new outfits and colour schemes for bricks in the sandbox mode. There’re animals living throughout the world to find, and other collectables. LEGO Bricktales has a satisfying level of depth to everything you do, but it’s the creation process that acts as the centrepiece to your adventure.

LEGO Bricktales offers you a chance to be creative, transporting you back in time to when LEGO was about the freedom to build what you want without following pages and pages of instructions. While there are certain guidelines, it’s all about how you get to the finish line. The friendly feel to the story and the humour is light, which is something missing in a lot of games today. There’s a fair bit to do outside of building, and when worlds are built so delicately and beautifully, there’re plenty of reasons for fans of LEGO to delve into Clockstone’s charming puzzler.