LEGO Bricktales video game review – brick bridge building
What’s up guys, this is Balazs from RacingBrick! Today I will review something very unusual on the channel, a LEGO video game called Brick Tales! Spoiler warning, this review might reveal details about the story and the puzzles of the game. So, I’m sure all of you played with a LEGO video game at least once in your life, and they usually work a very similar way. Let’s take an IP like Star Wars or Batman, add all the characters possible, give it a familiar story with lots of funny moments, and a more or less open world to explore.
Well, Brick Tales is nothing like that. It is developed by ClockStone, the studio behind the popular Bridge Constructor series. I played with an ancient game that was similar to these about 20 years ago, it was called Pontifex. Does it ring a bell to anyone? Anyway, the aim of these games is to build bridges with a given amount of parts that will be able to support some vehicles passing the bridge. So believe it or not the exact same concept is adapted to the LEGO world in Brick Tales. You won’t necessarily recognize this for the first sight,
as game practically begins in this underground laboratory where we meet our grandfather, who likes to talk a lot. Additionally he has a robot, Rusty, who will become our sidekick during
the basics of the game in the form of some tutorials. Question marks will provide information, like this basic practice how to move and assemble bricks, the hammer sign means something to build. Icons are gold when before check those items, after completion they turn green. We gradually learn how to move bricks, how to handle the camera, how to rotate bricks, and so on. The building itself happens in a dedicated construction environment, and we need to do things in a predefined volume marked with the dotted lines. Things get more and more complicated, and unfortunately no building instructions
are provided. When we need to build something, it will be tested. Either weights are dropped to test the stability, or later a rolling robot tests the constructions where you are supposed to walk through. Structural integrity is important, it might be handy if you payed attention to physics at school. When we finish the tutorial the concept is revealed, this is grandfather’s neglected theme park, and we have to help him to restore it otherwise the land will be seized. The robot can help but he needs energy, and we need to gather Happiness crystals in different worlds accessible
through the portal. This gets revealed by the way through an endless discussion… Our character can be properly customized by the way, there are lots of different pieces to choose from. The first world is a jungle, where a plane crash happens, we need to help the survivors. The things to build will become more and more difficult, here we need to make some simple stairs. Aesthetics are not important, until the structure works and doesn’t fall apart. Usually there are more pieces than needed, so you can either go for a simple but working solution, or you can try
to make something nice. The cool part – whatever you build will appear in the game level as well, and your character will most probably walk through it. This bridge took a bit more time, but here you can really see the extra amount of pieces you get. Another bonus – there’s a sandbox mode where you can add extra pieces to the already completed constructions, and those will also appear in the current level. Controls are a bit challenging to master in general, and sometimes you need to play with the camera angles to put things in the place
where you wanted them to be. The game is physics based, but I’m not 100% sure that LEGO bricks would behave this way in real life. In this case you need to build a support for the platform, and it obviously won’t work if only one side is supported. But honestly I’m not sure this construction would really work in reality if there are only those single stud connections in the middle. We get some additional abilities going forward, like this smashing that helps to get rid of some obstacles. Apart from bridge-building there are other types of challenges as
well – in this case we have to copy a statue, and later on we need to build a functional gyrocopter. This one is interesting, as it seems to focus more on the position of the rotor rather than the amount of bricks connecting it to the fuselage. The scenario is similar to the previous one, I’m not sure in reality a single brick would be sufficient for this job. I could finish the first level in about an hour, and according to the status screen here towards the end I made a good progress with the story, but there
are a lot of additional things to find. Unfortunately I did not receive too many hints about those, found a few animals though. Once we rescue everyone from the plane crash we get our reward, the happiness crystal. By using it we can renovate the first item of the amusement park. And we really need to do that, we have to “design” seats for this device. The process here is slightly different than before, as we are practically free to build anything, there’s only a minimal amount of pieces used. If you are looking for puzzles to solve then this
might seem unnecessary, but you cannot proceed without designing 3 set of seats. Level 2 is a desert world, with a bazaar where an earthquake makes some trouble. Here it is really not obvious how to progress, you need to talk to characters a lot to get to the challenges to solve. Yet another type of building, we need to rebuild the stand for a merchant, and the goal might be a bit confusing if you are not a native English speaker, although there’s some color coding in the instructions to guide you, I have to confess I did not
pay attention to that so I didn’t understand initially what tip should be high above the figure. This is one of the next challenges, and it was very late so I have to confess that I gave up trying here. It’s a good occasion to say a few words about the play experience. I am not a regular gamer, the last one I was playing with was probably Worms Armageddon… ok, I playing with Forza more recently. Anyway, I think the challenges of the first level are ok, but you really need to like puzzle games and the bridge builder
concept to enjoy Brick Tales. Meanwhile there’s the story element with lots of talking which means lots of reading, I’m not totally convinced that these two will work well together for everyone. I asked my son as well to test the game. He’s 14, he plays Minecraft, Forza, and other competitive video games, he has a lot of experience with LEGO as well, but at some points he became confused and he said some help or hints would be definitely helpful. I have to agree with that, if you are stuck at a challenge then there’s no any form of
help or hints to progress, at least I couldn’t find any, and you cannot move forward with the story. All in all the game looks very nice, it’s refreshingly different from the usual LEGO video game style, but the target audience is definitely smaller as well. I suggest to try the demo version to see if you enjoy the experience or not. The full game will be available from tomorrow, I tested it on PC via Steam, I will update the description when all platforms and the pricing will become public. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments,
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