LEGO® Bricktales

Light puzzle game with a little bit of exploration. No combat, skill trees, dialog, or action. (Nothing like the Tt games.) Just move around, talk, and build stuff. When you find a broken bridge, use Lego pieces (limited types and quantities) to build a new bridge. Or assemble large pre-fab Lego chunks to reform a statue. It's things like that. As you play, you get a few of upgrades (that you take with you to other levels) to open up new areas and collect new items. The writing is charming; what you'd expect from a Lego product, with the same level of puns and subtle humor and some groaners (a couple bordered on "if the kid knows this it's almost vulgar", but nothing a kid's movie wouldn't have). After you've built the puzzles, you can change them to free-build mode, where you get unlimited elements, and additional types of elements to embellish the area, so long as you still meet the criteria required to have passed the puzzle in the first place. There are a few TACOs through the game: each stage has its own "currency" you find in chests, used to unlock new minifig pieces to change your pawn's appearances and to unlock new elements and colors for the free-build mode. Each stage also has one character who wants you to find a bunch of a specific animal, which are hidden through all the stages. (Reward: more of that stage's currency.) Music is pretty good. A couple of the stages are very catchy. Good graphics. They're not "bendy Legos" like seen in Tt or the movies, but are as you would get with the real Lego (ex: bats fly by rotating forward). Some may dislike these animations. Negatives: Your walk pace is slow and it eventually becomes tiring, especially during late-game back-tracking. Also, all the TACOs clear at once, after you get the last upgrade. It'd be better if some were able to be completed before you got all upgrades, just to spread it out. No real replay, but free-play building may appeal to some. No sandbox building; just rebuild mode with extras.