LEGO Bricktales PS5 review. Candidly, I’ve never really been a fan or necessarily been invested in LEGO from a strictly physical perspective. Sure enough, I have put plenty of hours into the veritable avalanche of licensed LEGO games that take in the Star Wars, Marvel, DC properties and more in recent years, but I’ve never felt the urge to sit down at my desk, turn on the lamplight and spend hours putting together a real-world construct using actual LEGO bricks.
LEGO Bricktales PS5 Review
A Warmly Charming And Thoughtful Puzzler That Evokes The Best Of LEGO
LEGO Bricktales aims to change all that. By extricating the LEGO brand from any kind of crossover, we get to see and experience a distinctly pure vision of LEGO on its own terms that finds itself unfettered by the external charm and influences of those globally popular licenses. Equally, what we also get from LEGO Bricktales is an offering that aims to restore interest in those feet-destroying LEGO bricks by promoting the sort of interest and curiosity in the physical product that broadly has been missing from the licensed LEGO games.
As the young sibling of a dodderingly affable but genius professor, LEGO Bricktales has your cheerful LEGO avatar travelling through various portals and into a variety of different locations across the world. Accompanied by a helpful little robot, your quest is to collect happiness crystals by completing tasks for people and making them happy. Once a significant quantity of these happiness crystals have been amassed, they must then be used to power your grandfather’s amusement park to keep the town open and the people happy.
It’s somewhat twee and saccharine sweet stuff from a narrative perspective for sure, but the beautifully rendered isometric worlds, wholesome dialogue and charming characters that you’ll encounter all contribute to make LEGO Bricktales a silly-grin inducing adventure of whimsy that never fails to elicit cheer whenever you pick up the controller.
Viewed from a diorama style isometric perspective, LEGO Bricktales does ample justice to the LEGO aesthetic by authentically mirroring its real-world equivalent with all the chunky, blocky loveliness that one would be expect. As you wander around the environment you’ll encounter chasms that require bridges, unreachable high platforms that need staircases, various contraptions that must be fixed/created and so much more besides.
Further Reading – LEGO Builder’s Journey Review (PS5) – The Most Authentic LEGO Experience Of All
To resolve these problems you must use your LEGO constructing powers to progress and it’s here that the view shifts from that isometric perspective to a freeform builder style view in which the player has full control over the camera. Ostensibly the core of the experience, this is where LEGO Bricktales really comes to life as players must construct what is required with only the LEGO bricks that are available to them from a predesignated anchor point (in these challenges you can’t just create LEGO constructs in a void, but rather have to start from a single, unmoveable LEGO brick).
Much more than just some trite brick building activity, LEGO Bricktales embraces a fully developed physics engine that accurately reflects the real-world LEGO building experience. Take the construction of a simple bridge for example. Though you could easily just snap LEGO bricks on top of one another to create a makeshift crossing, you won’t know if it’s going to work until you test it by getting a handy robot to skate across the bridge and should the bridge not be constructed securely, the bridge will break and our hapless little robot will tumble down into the abyss.
By ensuring that the LEGO constructs that you create are governed by the sort of real world physics that you would experience if you were making these LEGO builds in real life, LEGO Bricktales authenticity is arguably enhanced by the fact. Brilliantly too, there’s often no single solution to many of the conundrums that LEGO Bricktales confronts the player with. As a result, it’s here that it encourages players to think with the sort of freeform latitude that wouldn’t be available if only a single solution was possible.
Like building anything from LEGO in real-life, you can stop whenever you like a resume construction whenever you’re ready. In this sense, LEGO Bricktales actually has a tangible advantage over its real-life counterpart in that when you walk away from your half-finished LEGO builds, you don’t need to worry about folks (or a fiendish feline friend) knocking it over and forcing you to restart from brick one.
Chiefly, there’s a real feeling of relaxation to proceedings – even when you’re tackling the most difficult conundrums that LEGO Bricktales has to offer. You never feel rushed or hurried and because of that LEGO Bricktales manages to carve out a delightful niche in your life where you can just pause and sit down for a few minutes, as you add some LEGO Bricks to make some progress on the current challenge or creation that you’re working on before stopping and leaving the game. Y’know, just like you would do with real LEGOs.
Beyond the fixed challenges that LEGO Bricktales confronts the players with throughout its story campaign, there is also a fully fledged sandbox mode where players can let their imaginations run wild as they fashion all manner of constructs without the limits seen elsewhere in LEGO Bricktales. This is the sort of thought provoking and educational stuff that should be available in schools really, such is the easily accessible way that it not only approaches LEGO construction, but also how it fosters a macro approach in players to general problem solving as well.
Further Reading – How To Use A Keyboard And Mouse On PS5, Which Games Are Compatible
If there’s one drawback to LEGO Bricktales, it’s that sometimes the manipulation of the virtual LEGO bricks can prove oddly tricky and fiddly. Most notably this seems to occur when you have LEGO bricks that you’re rotating and raising beneath previously placed bricks, as it proves less than intuitive to slot these bricks in exactly where you want. However, mitigation comes in the form of full keyboard and mouse support (LEGO Bricktales appears to be one of the few PS5 games that actually supports this), so if you’re lucky enough to have the requisite hardware it becomes less of an issue, but still, some additional tweaking on the controls for regular DualSense users would be welcome.
Ultimately, it’s refreshing at last to have a LEGO game where the titular building blocks don’t take a backseat to some fat stacks generating property that has been shoehorned into it. As much as the licensed LEGO games felt like a gateway for fans of physical LEGO bricks to leap into the gaming world, LEGO Bricktales feels like a long overdue inversion of that notion. Its distilled and restrained take on the imagination fuelled act of LEGO construction remains very much at its core. Hopefully this will encourage gamers to become interested in real-world LEGO in much the same way that the opposite has been true for the last two decades or so.
LEGO Bricktales not only clearly shows that the LEGO property is more than capable of standing up on its own two block-feet without the aid of a fancy licence, but it also more importantly reminds us why LEGO is loved the world over in the first place. LEGO Bricktales is all about firing up the imagination to construct LEGO to solve challenges as you subconsciously grin with the sort of wide-eyed wonder that LEGO has always prided itself on inciting in builders both young and old. Quite simply, LEGO Bricktales is brain-teasing, warmly charming and purely distilled joy that everybody should play.
LEGO Bricktales is out now on PS4 and PS5.
Review code kindly provided by PR.