Sometimes two things feel like they are made to go hand-in-hand with each other, and VR and LEGO is one of those things. Now VR users can experience this with LEGO Bricktales on Meta Quest 2 and 3.
Release Date: December 7th 2023
Developer: ClockStone STUDIO
Publisher: Thunderful Publishing
Price: £24.99
Reviewed On: Meta Quest 3
* Code Provided For Review *
SAVE THE AMUSEMENT PARK
Your grandfathers beloved amusement park is about to be closed, with the threat of being closed forever and the land being seized looming, if the required repairs aren’t made. He needs your help in recovering happiness crystals to power a mysterious device based on Alien technology. With this machine and the crystals the amusement park can be restored to working order and saved.
BUILD YOUR OWN SOLUTION
In order to collect the happiness crystals, you will need to enter the portal in the amusement park and be taken to a number of different biomes. All of these biomes will have their own problems they need solving, solve these for them and you will get their happiness crystal.
This will have you walking around the biomes helping the residents and solving puzzles. These puzzles are mainly solved with building solutions, for example; bridges, statues or even a helicopter. When doing these are you transferred to build mode, this will give you a set number of a selection of pieces to use. You don’t need to use all the pieces provided, but you will need to a build a working solution, which you will then test and see if it holds up. To add a little more to the task of the build the team have also added some prerequisites for the build, which also need to be completed to allow you to continue.
When you have the happiness crystal its time to return to your grandfather, he will then use this to restore one of the rides. But, you are not done there, you will need to build parts of the rides for him to finish off the repairs.
Outside of the building puzzles, you will require some new skills in each biome, that you will need to use to get some blocked off areas or solutions to puzzles, like pulling levels or switches. Then these skills might be useful for finding things in other biomes, so make sure to revisit and see what these open up for you.
You will get some side quests, this will see members of the biomes asking you to collect them some animals from birds to chameleons. These will be spread about all the biomes, so you will need to explore them all to find enough. Also you will find chests, which will require you to work out how to get to them. This will reward with currencies for each zone, that will allow you to visit the shop in that biome and buy bricks for sand-box mode or more costumes for your mini-figure.
LEGO Bricktales does come with a couple of frustrations, that have also transferred over from the original release. With the frustrations that stood out to me being not being able reset your build or building area. Meaning if you get a part wrong or fails your work space gets messy as you remove blocks. It would be great to have an option to reset all the ones not connected to anything to the starting points. On top of this if a build went totally wrong, the ability to reset the build without needing to exit from the building segment to re-enter it would be better. The other issues being the lack of build instructions if you are struggling, I just feel it should be an option to view them if you want, especially with the game being more kid-friendly.
As aforementioned there is a sand-box mode that is unlocked once you complete a bespoke construction spot. Unfortunately this isn’t the free-for-all build mode I would have loved to see in the game. This will basically let you revisit a build, improve it and lets you use the blocks you have unlocked in the other biomes to mix it up a bit.
BRICK BY BRICK BIOMES
One thing I love about LEGO Bricktales is how they have handled to visuals, with a great 1:1 diorama of the biomes you visit – which transfers perfectly into VR. Which gives that feeling of having this LEGO biome build in front of you, and if you have a Quest 3 the color passthrough mode increases even further. With your mini-figure and residents movement looking like stop-motion animations it all comes together perfectly. With the ability to rotate and zoom in and out of the build showing all the details that gives LEGO it’s charm and this carries that charm into the game.
The biomes are all brought to life using mainly music and environmental sounds when required. For example the medieval biome has music that feels like you are on an epic quest, then the jungle biome uses Amazonian music with the sounds of wildlife. There isn’t any spoken audio in the dialogue, so you will be reading the conversations, but this really suits the feeling of LEGO.
COMFORT
A WHIMSICAL ADVENTURE
Summary
LEGO Bricktales takes the LEGO license and gives you the ability to bring this beloved toy into your home via Virtual Reality. It might not be the ultimate free-for-all LEGO building game I was hoping for, but it gives you a great puzzle game that has a lot of charm. Allowing you to build your own solutions, see them appear in the biome and then interact with them. With the team making sure the building design is perfectly suited to VR, making it feel like you are adding to an incomplete build in your own home (which is only increased when playing the very solid mixed reality mode).
