Lego’s Smart Play Pokémon can train and battle but won’t give its name

When Lego announced its tech-packed smart bricks at CES, we were impressed by the potential — enough to give it our take. Best in Show award. But when the first Star Wars actually begins It was launched in Marchwe were less enamored. All this promise of intelligent interaction and creative play ultimately boils down to a few vocal barks and flashing lights, with the smartest features we saw at CES nowhere to be found.

Lego today announced Generation 2, with 12 new sets launching this summer, promising Pokemon gameplay and some of the smarts we’ve been missing. After a few hours of training and fighting with the new combos this morning, the Smart Brick was clear He is It’s getting smarter, but Lego is taking the slow road to realizing the potential promised in January — and is still struggling to implement one of its most obvious selling points: official sound effects.

The 12 groups announced today are Available for pre-order nowBut it won’t go on sale until August 1st. There are only two “all-in-one” toy sets, meaning they include at least a Smart Brick and a charger, providing everything you need to use the smart features: a $69.99 Pikachu set with a treehouse and Smart Brick, and a $119.99 Battle Set featuring Charizard and Jolteon that includes two Smart Brick pieces. The other 10 sets, which range from a $14.99 Jigglypuff to an $89.99 battle between Cubone and Gengar, are what Lego calls “compatible” — meaning they include Smart Tags that can trigger certain effects and interactions, but not the Smart Bricks needed to power the whole thing.

Lego has added some complex interactions that were missing from the early Star Wars sets, most exciting of all being the ability to battle two Pokémon. Shaking two Pokémon connected to a Smart Brick together — and yes, you’ll need two bricks, which means purchasing either a Charizard set or something from the Star Wars line — triggers Battle Mode. When the 8-bit battle music plays, kids can fight by thrusting the two figures at each other through the air: quickly pushing forward triggers a quick, low-damage attack, holding the figure back for a few seconds charges a stronger move, and pulling back to help avoid damage. After a minute or two of back and forth, one Pokémon will be victorious, with flashing lights and victory music.

Combat is intentionally simple, said Federico Begher, Lego’s senior vice president of product development and marketing. The four basic mechanics — shaking to initiate combat, two types of attack, and dodging — are the “sweet spot” in a type of open-ended gameplay that “can’t be too complicated, can’t be confusing.” This is far from a complete re-creation of the games’ turn-based combat, but there is at least a little skill to it, mostly in mastering your dodge and learning when to use an offensive attack.

there He is There’s more going on behind the scenes, too. Not all Pokemon are created equal, and some are inherently stronger than others. Mewtwo should always have an advantage over Pikachu, after all. The Type advantage also applies, so Squirtle will beat Charmander more often than not. Each Smart Pokemon, hidden within its body except when Smart Bricks are added or removed, shows its type(s) along with its Pokédex number, and different Pokemon types create different sound effects as well – a charge of lightning for Pikachu, a rush of water for Lapras.

Then there is the training. Tapping a Pokémon on a Training Marker puts it into Training Mode, at which point tapping it against targets included in combos (or other objects of your choice, or simply waving it in the air – the Smart Brick’s accelerometer does most of the work here) will level up your Pokémon, making it stronger for its next battle. Before you get too excited, none of this is permanent: the power boost from training only lasts until the Smart Brick is removed from that Pokemon (or its battery runs out), so you can’t train a squad over time. A Lego representative said this is partly due to the design — in their tests, kids enjoyed repeating the training loop from scratch — though I suspect that’s mostly hampered by the technological limits of the smart bricks themselves.

These limitations are also partly responsible for the most glaring flaw of these new sets: none of these Pokémon say their name, nor do they make specific sounds recognizable from the games or anime. that it one Something I wanted Lego Pikachu to do, and it simply can’t, instead making generic creature noises and a weird electricity effect. There were similar limitations in previous Star Wars sets, which had Darth Vader’s heavy breathing but no recognizable sounds from the lasers and figurines. The technological limitations are due to the brick’s runtime synthesizer, which generates sounds in real time using a MIDI-like system, and its meager memory, which forced Lego to save the number of sound effects packed into it. There’s another practical concern though: Pokémon don’t all have the same names and noises across the world. Pikachu may be Pikachu wherever you go, but Squirtle is Zenigame in Japan. Unlike toys, Lego bricks are not local, so any sound effects must work wherever the toys are played. Children will have to say “pika pika” to themselves, to avoid hearing a Pokemon name that doesn’t sound right to them. Maybe that’s why Luke Skywalker didn’t speak either, not every kid would expect him to speak English.

The 12 sets range in size and complexity, from an 88-piece Jigglypuff set to an 831-piece battle between Umbreon and Garchomp, though most have at least some moving parts, like Gengar’s dangerously vibrating tongue. Some of these larger sets are rated 10+, although the simpler sets are intended for ages six and up. Larger decks tend to build larger Pokémon as well, though all remain interoperable in battles. They’re relatively strong, and all the Lego employees I spoke to said the sets have undergone frequent playtesting and iterations to limit their weak points, but since training and combat involve hitting characters quickly, they’ll likely eventually break apart. An unfortunate mid-battle collision resulted in my Charmander being destroyed by a hard-hitting Bulbasaur, though fortunately Lego had a “toy doctor” on hand to make impromptu repairs. What’s less clear so far is how much variety there is when you draw a Pokémon from one group to interact with a prop from another group outside of battles – they should always work together, but I haven’t had enough playtime to see how many unique effects are triggered by unusual combinations.

Pokémon Smart Play sets are a clear step up in complexity from the Star Wars options thanks to battles alone, which build a level of screenless gameplay in and around the open-ended creative play. But Lego has not yet released sets that use some of the More advanced features it showed off at CESincluding interactions that change depending on the exact placement of letters, markers, and bricks. This seems like a step forward, and proof that Smart Play can offer more than just flashing lights and buzzing sounds, even if its true potential has yet to be realized.

Photography by Dominic Preston/The Verge