Lego Isn't What It Used To Be

When I think back to the toys I used to play with a child, a lot of them involved construction. Whether it was the wooden railways of Brio, the metallic nuts and bolts of Meccano, the fiddly plastic of K’nex, or the papier mache Tracy Island Blue Peter encouraged everyone to make, a lot of my childhood activities focussed on making stuff. Model airplanes. Painted eggs. Remote control cars that were customized into fighting robots. And, of course, there was Lego.

The beauty of Lego, and of many of the construction-based toys mentioned above, was that it was about the expression of imagination. It was about making something out of a set of abstract bits and pieces that become almost anything you wanted them to be. You would set about wanting to make a pirate ship or a space station, and probably wind up with something that resembled a garish kaleidoscopic bomb site, but that provided a life lesson about creative ambition: you can’t create something really good without a lot of hard work and failed attempts. That’s assuming a younger sibling hadn’t eaten the Lego by accident, or a parent hadn’t trodden on it barefoot and thrown out all the blocks in an agonised rage.

Over the years, however, Lego has started to incorporate brands and franchises. Specialist sets themed around Harry Potter and Star Wars started to appear, presumably for indoctrinated kids who didn’t have enough imagination or patience to pretend that their misshapen cluster of multi-coloured blocks was a Deathstar or Hogwarts Castle. Then, these specialist Lego brand crossovers became a series of videogames developed by Traveller’s Tales. I’ve played quite a few of them now. These games more than anything else reinforce this feeling I get that there’s something very un-Lego about where Lego has ended up.

The announcement of Lego City: Undercover and its subsequent trailer made me raise half an eyebrow, since this will be the first Lego game in a while that isn’t attached to another blockbuster franchise like Harry Potter and Star Wars. Still, there’s no evidence from what I’ve seen so far that Lego City: Undercover will be a grand departure from Traveller’s Tales decidedly un-Lego formula. Ironically for a toy brand that revolves around construction, the Lego games seem mostly pre-occupied with breaking things. You break enemies in combat sections by beating them up. You break apart the environment so random objects will drop collectible coins. Even the game’s one element of construction, which rarely asks you to do more than hold down the B or circle button, usually involves having to break something to reveal what you can build. Occasionally the game will throw in a simple puzzle or, more recently, a driving section, but on the whole it isn’t a very engaging formula. It also isn’t very Lego.

The strange thing is, other videogames seem to have embodied the spirit of Lego in a way that the Lego games haven’t done for years. I’m talking about games like Minecraft, LittleBigPlanet, Trials Evolution, and The Sims series. These games find a sweet spot between accessibility and potential for creative expression. While the toolset of LittleBigPlanet isn’t as flexible or abstract as a series of Lego bricks, it’s still diverse enough to allow creations as disparate as old Mario levels and calculators, and it manages to do so without being shackled to a pre-established multi-million dollar franchise.

There isn’t anything terribly wrong with Traveller’s Tales Lego games. They look great, they're fun to play in short bursts if you have someone else to play with, and they have a charming sense of humour. It’s just sad and a little strange to see other videogames doing a better job of realising the creative spirit of Lego I remember as a child than the actual Lego videogames.

I'll leave you with a picture of the gold medal I won when I went to Legoland years and years ago, although I can't for the life of me remember what I won it for.