'LEGO Battles' poorly constructed

• By JOSHUA WASCOM
• Special to 2theadvocate.com
• Published: Jun 16, 2009

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“LEGO Battles” breaks with many traditions of the recent LEGO games. Instead of being a 3-D platformer, it’s a 2-D real-time strategy game. Instead of using licensed properties like Star Wars and Batman, the storylines follow characters from various distinctive LEGO sets. And instead of being an entertaining and action-filled experience, it’s a slow and shallow journey that just doesn’t feel complete.

There aren’t really any massive failures, just a host of small deficiencies that combine with the absence of any major successes to produce a game that simply isn’t worth your time, let alone your money.

The game takes a long time to get started. The tutorials for the basic gameplay are spread over six maps, and you don’t have access to many basic units and building types until the map in which they are officially introduced. The gradual introduction is by no means an inherently flawed concept, but it simply takes too long here, devoting large maps to a few units, buildings and commands without including any challenges to your mastery of these ideas.

Nearly every early map feels like a slightly interactive tooltip, unless of course you choose to stay after the objectives are completed to look for the many collectible blue coins, red bricks and treasure chests scattered across each map. Then you get access to some very carefully and deliberately designed tedium. Having to use the tiny map to find every last forest and knock down every last tree in a level just to find a couple of blue coins gets old very quickly.

Which brings up the biggest problem of all: the overall interaction scheme is a sort of snowball of failure, getting more and more frustrating as the game progresses.

At first, it’s simply a matter of a few problems selecting your units, but by the time any real complex combat takes place, you’ll be dealing with a map that can either be navigated quickly or well, but not both. Frequently used commands are as hard to reach as the ones you never use.

Outside of a handful of moderately entertaining cinematics, the only interesting things in “LEGO Battles” are some really curious problems. There are better RTS games, even on the DS, and there are better LEGO games everywhere.