LEGO Bricktales

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

.

Review:

LEGO Bricktales is a Puzzle game released on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2022. In this game, players are presented with a series of self-contained puzzles where they are tasked with building structurally-sound bridges and supports, copy designs of other objects, and so on, all using… what else? LEGO blocks.

This is all couched within a silly story about portals and superintelligent AI and a race to clean up a theme park before it’s foreclosed on by a mayor. Yeah, not exactly compelling stuff, but it serves as a framing device for the gameplay.

This gameplay involves multiple puzzles that have players given a confined space to work in and a limited number of LEGO blocks to work with, with a specific task in mind. If your task involves some amount of structural integrity, you’ll be able to use a robotic drone to test it before getting the approval to complete the task. Not only can blocks not float in mid-air, but they need to be pieced together in a way that reasonably makes sense.

What this results in is a pretty compelling Puzzle game that should appeal to anyone who didn’t just like making things that looked cool with LEGOs, but who took pride in making things that were well-made and wouldn’t fall apart easily. Yeah, I was one of those nerds, sue me.

The biggest problem here is that the controls are a bit awkward and placing a LEGO block in exactly the right spot can take some doing. Also, your character’s movement in the framing device keeping all of this together is slow and clunky – I kinda’ wish this game just copied over the character movement from the Traveller’s Tales LEGO games.

As for the presentation, this game uses fairly simple 3D environments, but they’re reasonably well-lit and look decent enough, and work well enough for the gameplay. These visuals are backed by a dreamy, relaxed soundtrack that works well for this game.

Overall, I really liked LEGO Bricktales, and I appreciate that LEGO is doing more to try and diversify the types of games they’re making rather than just doing a million and one movie-licensed games. While this game is held back a bit by its control issues, I think that fans of Puzzle games will find this to be a really enjoyable game with just enough room for creativity to keep things interesting.

tl;dr – LEGO Bricktales is a Puzzle game where players solve puzzles by building structures using LEGO blocks. The controls have a few issues, but otherwise this is a solid puzzle game that fans of the genre should find well worth playing.

Grade: B+

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Ben, Andy Miller, Exlene, Homer Simpin, Johannes, Talissa, Eli Goodman, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Ilya Zverev, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}