Lego Brick Tales Review (Switch)

It seems strange that over the years very few Lego games have been focused on the core building aspect of the little plastic blocks. Lego Brick Tales is looking to change that without relinquishing the story aspect completely.

Here, we effectively have an original, non-licensed based, Lego adventure which is more heavily based around puzzle solving than any of the game in the franchise previously. You play a Lego Minifigure who is tasked with helping his grandfather rebuild a run-down amusement park. In order to do this, you have to go into different themed biomes and find magic crystals.

The biomes are themed around locations such as desserts, jungles and Medieval castles and you make your way through them by talking to other minifigures and solving their problems through building things. The first jungle biome isn’t the best, but things do pick up considerably once you move on from there with the game mostly staying on the right side of being fun. Just expect to be building a lot of bridges.

The building aspect can best be described as working functionally. When you must build something, you are moved to a self-contained space with all the shapes available to you set out on the floor and an allotted space set up for you to build within. Along with this you’ll get key instructions such as ‘place pot on top’ or ‘use three elements’, but for the most part you are free to use the pieces how you see fit. There are a couple of occasions where the instructions aren’t particularly clear but on the whole, nothing is too obscure and while bridges do pop up a little too often, you’ll also be building working machinery and other things to keep it interesting.

The biggest barrier to your building is the control scheme. No matter how many hours we put in, it never became anything other than a bit awkward. Though the team are continuing to look at this and further patches are incoming. A Switch control scheme is never going to match that of a human hand but again, we did get used to it and after getting through the first biome it rarely caused enough of an irritation to stop us completing the builds.

Like a lot of the Lego games there is also this relentless sense of fun and creativity that runs through it. It’s just wonderfully charming to the point that when you hit one of the bits that doesn’t quite work it’s easily overlooked because two seconds later, you’ll be talking to a Lego ghost or collecting Lego hermit crabs and it’s impossible to stay frustrated.

Overall, this is a good attempt at trying to merge the idea of free brick building with something story based that isn’t attached to a major license. It is a bit rough around the edges but the key elements such as the charm and feel of a Lego world are present and once you have got used to its quirks there is a lot of enjoyment to be had.