Lego Bricktales Review: Build Brick Better

 Lego games are not usually centered around their actual construction toy namesake. A massive library of Traveller's Tales games have been built on crossovers with many licensed franchises, turning properties like Lord of the Rings and Marvel superheroes into slapstick action-platformers, and Lego A Builder's Journey used the brick-building toys to tell a heartfelt story. Lego games don't often capture the feeling of actually playing with Lego bricks, but Lego Bricktales actually does with incredible accuracy.

Bricktales is all about building, transporting you to five Lego-themed worlds and presenting you with a series of physics-based building puzzles. The physics system underlying the whole thing is impressive, as the Lego bricks actually perform the way any experienced brick-builder would expect. Whenever you finish a project that requires weight-bearing, you'll need to test it with a falling object or a little robot crossing your construction to make sure it holds up. If you didn't reinforce it with support struts, the pieces will just fall apart. Even elements like a step being one spacer too high could create enough fall momentum to break the structure.

In that way, Lego Bricktales functions like a STEM toy, teaching some basic engineering principles in a fun and engaging way, just like actual Lego bricks. Putting it into a virtual space like this means you get to stress test the results of your hard work in a way that feels personal and tactile. You can sense the physicality of the interlocking brick system in a way that other games haven't quite captured. It's very satisfying to walk up a set of stairs that you designed yourself, recognizing your own patterns and even your mistakes. And once you've completed the building challenge, you unlock a free play mode that lets you use additional decorative elements to make the structures look great. As you progress through a biome, you'll be surrounded by your own works of brick-built functional art, using them to traverse the environments.

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