Official Score
Overall - 85%
85%
LEGO Bricktales is exactly the kind of game you would expect as both a work of Thunderful Games and a product of the LEGO brand. Seeing your creations come to life, even visually sickening ones, is a rewarding experience and a must-play for LEGO enthusiasts.
Thunderful Games looks to bring the magical world of LEGO to their popular construction sim style with the release of LEGO Bricktales, an innovative and challenging brick-by-brick construction game that gives players the opportunity to see their creations come to life in new and exciting ways.
LEGO Bricktales Review
LEGO Bricktales takes place across five vibrant and engaging biomes, each filled with unique building challenges. Each one requires players to construct tools, pathways, and solutions to various puzzles in a brick-by-brick construction mode before witnessing the construction come to life and fulfill its purpose in real-time. It’s a fantastic concept, and one that flourishes whether you decide to carefully place each brick in a design of glorious precision or make some Frankenstein creation just to get the job done.
LEGO Bricktales follows the journey of Grandpa’s young assistant as he explores various worlds in an effort to bring Grandpa’s decrepit theme park back to life through the power of pure happiness. As you explore each world, you aid its inhabitants in a variety of ways, eventually making the world so happy, you can bottle it up, package it, and bring it back to Grandpa to use to decorate and reinvigorate the theme park world.
Each biome is completely unique, each with different challenges and obstacles to overcome. As you adventure through the game, you will explore jungles, cities, pirate coves, deserts, and even aid a king with a poisoned water supply and dragon problems in the medieval world. Each biome is carefully crafted, full of color, secrets to discover, and animals to collect, all in a compact and easily digestible formula to welcome players both young and old. The iconic LEGO style is constant throughout and truly makes it feel like you’re walking through a world of someone’s LEGO creation.
Throughout the game, there are two main building challenges. The vast majority are just that: building challenges that require you to construct something while following certain criteria such as using specific bricks, ensuring it maintains a balance, or making sure a bridge doesn’t just crumble into the waters below. The secondary style is a more vanity-based construction, forgoing strict regulations and rules, and allowing the player to express themselves freely.
The primary building challenges throughout the story. These include everything from a simple bridge or walkway, to complicated cranes and a massive pirate ship, are spread throughout each region and act as progress barriers you must overcome. This cane lead to some frustration if you’re struggling with a particular build. There are no hints, no help function, you simply need to build that particular item in a specific fashion before you can move on.
While frustrating at times, it quickly becomes a journey of accomplishment, with each completed build feeling more rewarding than the last and at the end of each world, you get to return to the theme park for some really creative vanity builds. You can design a swinging pirate ship, build the carts on a rollercoaster, or setup swan boats for the boating lake. It’s a warming adventure that bridges together Thunderful Games’ popular construction design with LEGO’s legendary play.
Although mostly flawless throughout, I did encounter a few minor issues while playing. If you spend too long on a particular build it becomes very sluggish, not turning bricks, not responding to controls, and in a game where the controls are arguably its biggest downfall, it does get quite irritating. A quick restart of the game fixes it, but it’s a problem nonetheless.
LEGO Bricktales is exactly the kind of game you would expect as both a work of Thunderful Games and a product of the LEGO brand. Seeing your creations come to life, even visually sickening ones, is a rewarding experience and a must-play for LEGO enthusiasts.
