We first took a look at Lightbrick Studio’s Builder’s Journey back in 2021, and while that game has been updated a couple of times, the announcement of their latest game, LEGO Voyagers, back in June that really piqued my interest. We bought a copy of the game from the Nintendo online store, and sat down with our regular games correspondent, Harry, as we played the game through over the course of a few nights. Read on, below the break, to read his review…
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For reasons best known to myself, I have installed Light Brick Studio’s Builder’s Journey on my Apple TV. Last week, the onscreen icon changed, and I thought I should find out why. The game has just undergone its 4th major version update, introducing a new series of puzzles: Robot’s Adventure. [Note: this post was already in development when this morning’s news about Light Brick Studio’s new game, LEGO® Voyagers, was announced]
Builder’s Journey features one of the simplest interfaces for a player to engage with a digital brick on a touchscreen that I have experienced. Point and click: pick up a brick from a pile on the level. Click again- spin it around. Give a sustained touch: it clicks in place. The studio has invested heavily in making the bricks as lifelike as possible – from their opacity, colour – even scratches and play wear on systems with selected graphics cards. Over the years, there have been a couple of content updates: one introducing new levels, and another introducing a creative mode, where you can use a handful of elements to create your own digital models.
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4 years ago, LightBrick studio brought us LEGO Builders Journey. This game received a major update last week and continues to provide me with joy after all this time. (My review is following soon). Today at Summer Games Fest, the studio have revealed their second game: LEGO Voyagers. This multiplatform co-op adventure game is about friendship and play. When two friends make it their mission to rescue an abandoned spaceship, they embark on a journey beyond their wildest dreams, ultimately learning the value of being connected.
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When I first saw gameplay previews of LEGO Horizon Adventures, I was transported back to the early days of TT Games’ LEGO Star Wars: father and son seated on the couch, striving to defeat the Empire. Harry has since grown up, and is a passionate fan of the universe created in Horizon: Zero Dawn. So when a LEGOfied version of the game was released, we went to the shops to pick up a copy for the Nintendo Switch. Around a month later, Sony via the LEGO Group sent through some codes for Steam – which was useful to compare the graphics/gameplay experience. I got distracted by work, and Harry finished playing the game. Here are his thoughts
LEGO: Horizon Adventures aims to be a kid-friendly adaptation of Guerrilla Games’ blockbuster 2017 RPG Horizon: Zero Dawn, a game that was partly about tribal humans hunting robot dinosaurs and a chosen one trying to prevent cultists from unleashing an ancient evil, but was also about how, centuries ago, a guy who legally isn’t Elon Musk accidentally caused the end of the world with rogue unstoppable kill-droids and in the face of inevitable destruction, the world’s governments lied to the civilian population about there being hope so that they would lay down their lives by the millions in the fight to buy time to complete Project Zero Dawn, which the governments led people to believe was a superweapon that would wipe out the robots and save them all but was in fact a project to create a sapient AI and facilities that would, after humanity’s extinction, allow said AI to complete the decryption and transmission of the kill-droid’s shutdown codes, reconstitute the ravaged biosphere, and release cloned humans and animals back into the rejuvenated planet (…err, spoiler alert).
When LEGO Horizon Adventures was first announced, my first thought (after I’d been sufficiently convinced that it wasn’t an elaborate fan-made fake, because I’ve been burned by those before), was that it was going to be an ambitious project, for sure; comparable to trying to adapt Dune as a pop-up book. While I am disappointed but not surprised that Guerrilla Games have chosen to strip out most of what I considered to be the most interesting narrative ideas of the original in the process of abridging it for a younger audience, the end result is a functional and even fun game about fighting cultists and robot dinosaurs for about eight hours that does an admirable job of trying to make high-concept sci-fi accessible to a target audience of ten-year-olds and their exhausted parent(s).
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We were fortunate to have the chance to receive an Awesome Edition download code for the new LEGO 2K Drive. Released a month or two ago, I passed it on to Harry, our in-house gamer, to look at. Here are his thoughts…
So, let’s talk about the kids’ game about building wild and wacky vehicles to get around and accomplish a variety of esoteric tasks in an open world that came out in early-to-mid-May, 2023. No, not Tears of the Kingdom; the other one. I’ll admit, I don’t envy the team at 2K right now because that’s got to have been a bit of a blow already, even before the whole micropayment issue, but I’ll get to that in due time.
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A few months ago now, we announced the forthcoming arrival of BrickTales, a Physics puzzler from Thunderful games. Release is coming up on October 12th and we were fortunate to be given the opportunity to take a look at the game, pre-release. Its been a busy few weeks, so I passed the Keys on this one over to our in-house games Reviewer, Harry .
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Like many people of a certain age, I grew up watching the Original Trilogy of Star Wars Movies as they rolled out in the cinemas. I then set watched the prequels as they played out, around the same time as my kids were born and in their early years. Finally, their first exposure to Star Wars came: not through the movies in the first instance, but through playing the TT Games – LEGO® Star Wars (covering episodes 1-3), LEGO® Star Wars II – Espisodes IV -VI, and then picking up the omnibus Complete Saga, on an alternative platform. This also served as part of their introduction to video games, and as a parent, I preferred this style of gameplay – mixed puzzles and cartoon gunfire, while tethered to each other, and taking the journey together. To be honest, I would have never completed episode VI if it were not for the cooperative play afforded by my son.
Now, 15 years is a long time in video games, but it might have even been a bit longer. Our kids have pretty well grown up (but are still at home), and the closest thing we now have in our house to cooperative regular game play is a game of Trivial pursuit (either via a Nintendo Switch or going old school, using a board, actual pieces and a 6-sided die.).
So part of me was quite excited about the prospect of sitting down again and replaying LEGO® Star Wars, covering the entire saga and spending some quality couch time with Harry. He has spent a little bit of time contemplating Games And Interactivity at university, while focussing on creative writing. I figured I could get him to write a review.
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We have a guest contributor today. While I play a few games on my phone, my son Harry has experienced a far greater range of diverse games iacross a variety of platforms. I thought it would be helpful to get his opinion on LEGO® Builder’s Journey – the debut game from Light Brick Studios. His opinion might be a little different to mine… and that’s OK. Read on for his take on the game…
Lego: Builder’s Journey
Developer: Light Brick Studio
Platforms: PC (Steam and Epic Games), Switch, iOS/Apple Arcade
Genre: Puzzle
Replayability: Low – Medium (depending on future updates)
Last week saw the arrival of the latest incremental update for LEGO Tower – version 1.4 – the casual game produced by Nimblebit in association with LEGO Games. For regular readers of this blog, it will come as no surprise that I was extremely excited by the content released. As well as some bug fixes, interface tweaks, new roof toppers and new floors to build, this update provided some new parts for players to collect and dress the residents of their towers. Full of nostalgia, these new elements include torsos from the 6000 Ideas Book, as well as Pirate figures (with the theme celebrating 30 years this year), adding to a collection of pirate hats added in V1.3 a couple of weeks ago.
Continue readingThe recent paucity of original content on this blog has been contributed to somewhat by picking up LEGO Friends: Heartlake Rush and allowing it to distract me from writing for a week or so. In return for this, I feel obliged to review it.
Inspired by 
the ‘Design a Friends Go-Kart’ competition running on LEGO Rebrick, I downloaded Heartlake Rush, an endless runner game. Here, you can take the residents of Heartlake City out for a drive: dodging obstacles, accumulating studs and gathering prizes to complete missions. Heartache Rush is available on both iOS and Android platforms for free. As a bonus to parents being nagged to the point of exhaustion, there are no in-app purchases!
You start the game by selecting your character: there is the range of the five friends: Andrea, Stephanie, Olivia, Mia and Emma, as well as Liam, Stephen, Ethan, Daniel (trapped here in his Hot Dog Suit) and Emily jones, on sabbatical from Elvendale! Each character has their own specific car. The figures depicted are shown following the 2018 design update.
Further characters can be unlocked after gathering an ever increasing number of studs. You can take any unlocked car out with any unlocked character, and apply any set of decals. Unfortunately, this is the extent of customization.
