LEGO Battles: Ninjago (DS)

There are some game genres that just seem like a terrible fit for kids, and the real-time strategy genre feels like it should be one of them. The focus on managing multiple different troop types in long battles where the player has to plan many moves ahead feels like a lot a young mind would have to wrap itself around to even stand a chance of succeeding, but simplification could conceivably make it accessible on at least a basic level. The LEGO Battles games try to introduce RTS gameplay to younger audiences as best they can, and with the help of both the LEGO brand and its T.V. show LEGO Ninjago: Masters of Spinjutzu to draw eyes towards it, this could have done a decent job of pulling in child players with its themes while subtly teaching them the more complicated intricacies of the strategy genre.

 

Unfortunately, some of the problems become clear the moment the player starts up the game’s story mode. The main story mode of LEGO Battles: Ninjago follows four fledgling ninja heroes who are recruited by Master Wu to learn the ancient art of Spinjutzu. Following the plot of the pilot episodes of the T.V. show, the ninjas need to fight against the skeletal Skulkin army lead by Wu’s evil brother Lord Garmadon, both sides of the conflict trying to find the four Golden Weapons of Spinjutzu to gain an edge. The story has a few motion cutscenes with no dialogue that don’t communicate things all too well, but the in-game dialogue boxes at least make sure important information is on the table, albeit for a story that doesn’t conclude since the pilot episodes also wrapped up with a cliffhanger. The issue isn’t really with this rather bare retelling of four T.V. episodes though but instead with how it structures the game’s action. Despite existing in a genre based around building up your forces to tackle whatever trials stand in your path, most of the story missions involve you moving your four ninjas around to easily destroy all opposition. While the game will pull back at times to leave you with only one ninja to try and introduce some difficulty into the affair, most of the time the forces you control are incredibly overpowered and stages just become about pointing them in the right direction to slaughter the opposition.

There is still some hope for a player’s experience if they want some decent pushback and emphasis on strategy though. While the story has only a handful of acts split into smaller levels, they all end with a level more focused on the game’s base-building, resource gathering, and troop building mechanics instead of just wrecking things with the main ninja team. Even better, the secondary story where it is played from the Skulkin Army’s perspective is made harder since you won’t always be starting a level with fully upgraded units, some stages asking you to succeed with only a few units or trying to build up a force that can put up a good fight. The diversity in level types is felt more in this mode as well. In the Ninjago story, whether you’re fighting an enemy army, doing training, taking down a dragon, or exploring an area, it mostly boils down to clicking on your heroes and clicking on what needs done. If you want to find the secret red brick to unlock cheats, minikits for hidden characters, or collect LEGO studs to get the True Ninja rankings for each level you will have to look around levels some, but these stages are still incredibly basic. Skulkin levels actually ask you to figure out where you should start building and how to not just deploy troops, but where to put them first and when a tactical retreat is the better option.

 

Just because they are an improvement doesn’t mean they are good though. The real-time strategy elements have been reduced down to the point that there’s very little wiggle room for anything outside of the simplest strategies, something made more evident in Battle Mode, which is where the building and army battles are the sole focus. Whether you’re the ninjas or the skeletons here, you’ll be restricted to only building five types of structures. The Brick Bank is where your characters can deposit collected building materials, the mine can produce them automatically, the barracks can create special units, the keep can upgrade them, and the tower can fire at enemies it can see. The structures do fill their roles well despite being simplified to one important process each, but the big issue with these has to be how finicky placing them is. Even on seemingly flat ground you might not be able to place them, and you have to make sure that the area has no characters in the building area, even the builders, before placing it. There is a fog of war over the battlefield too until you’ve sent characters out to explore and reveal what’s hiding, but this fog can also make early building fidgety as you try to find the arbitrary spots the game will allow a structure to be built, some locations almost useless because they are so difficult to work with.

The touch screen could have made the construction easy if not for the placement problems, but despite being a good fit for RTS games with its tap to select and box-drawing options to select your units, this has some flaws as well. Mainly, trying to deselect a character is unreliable. Sometimes clicking on empty ground will do it, other times it will make them move there. Sometimes it may only deselect part of a selected group, and the game will sometimes have you select a building automatically if your selections are too close to it. Pushing past these hiccups isn’t too hard when nothing is really so strong or complex that you’ll need reliable dexterousness, save perhaps another human in multiplayer, but it is an annoyance that is still hard to swallow. Your armies will never get too big to manage though. At most, you can have a decent batch of workers who are meant to build and gather resources rather than fight, but the amount of fighters is limited since each character is unique. If they die in battle you can revive them, but your army has a small set size it can reach pretty quickly, resources then going towards upgrading them to have special attack or support powers. A decently upgraded force, in a more difficult battle, will often be best served bumrushing targets, spamming abilities, and then retreating to the keep to heal up, splitting up your forces difficult to manage when the numbers are small and your opposition will likely reply to a threat with their own bumrushing tactics.

 

Admittedly, even pared down to basic elements and tactics, there is still a small level of strategy that keeps battles from becoming completely boring, save of course the cakewalks where the game gives you too much power. Battle Modes have their different modes to make them more of a challenge, such as Survival mode requiring you to hold back waves of enemies or Brick Race being about hitting a resource amount before your opponent. Sabotage or smart resource spending makes Brick Race more interesting, and with a decent opponent, even a typical army battle can involve decisions like whether to kill enemy forces first or destroy their buildings. The limits meant to let kids pick up the game do prevent it from being passable at its best moments though, and kids who do pick the game up might find the mechanics hard to grasp since they’re taught poorly and some useful abilities are only introduced after levels that essentially required them. The game has simplified its genre into a more digestible form, but it’s still not easy to organically pick up every detail, and when you’ve reached the end of what there is to offer in a fight, the stripped down mechanics leads to dull battles rather than accessible ones. Map variety can mean things will feel different between levels, but the game never concocts anything interesting enough to make use of things like the teleporters, tunnels, or other barriers to reaching your goals.

THE VERDICT: LEGO Battles: Ninjago had the admirable goal of taking the complex real-time strategy genre and simplifying it into something more digestible for young players, but it certainly didn’t find the right formula for doing so. The Ninja Path in the story is hilariously easy since they provide overpowered units, and even when the stages and Battle Mode divert to traditional base-building and resource-gathering or properly limit your power like in the Skulkin path, LEGO Battles: Ninjago doesn’t have enough going on to make these better built moments properly strategic. Too few troops, unreliable touch screen controls, and an emphasis on unimaginative approaches and attacks born from odd power balances and poor variety mean that on the whole, LEGO Battles: Ninjago can’t find a sturdy enough leg to stand on for its oversimplified gameplay.

 

And so, I give LEGO Battles: Ninjago for Nintendo DS…

A BAD rating. Perhaps one way to put the game in perspective is to think of it like a series of RTS battles, just with the later parts trimmed out. You do the building up and you begin deploying small forces like you would in a more strategic game, but things never evolve from there. You make sure your base is safe, sending your small army in when they’re built up enough, and you repeat that until you succeed. At most you need to worry about things like where to place damaging towers and where to deploy troops first, but there’s very little meaningful opposition, even harder opponents usually just having the health to last long enough to threaten you. Battle Mode and the Skulkin Path can find some moments where you will have to use some thought to succeed, especially on higher difficulties, but the Ninja Path is almost entirely a power trip as your ninjas can mostly handle anything they face, the story having so little to it that the heroes’ story becomes a drag quickly. Good ideas the game has suffer for having little to work with, so even unique level goals or environmental objects can’t really take root.

 

LEGO Battles: Ninjago is essentially the basics of a better built game, it just never goes beyond that in its effort to keep its young audience on board. Unfortunately, they’ll likely be bored because of the swinging from incredibly easy slaughters to getting slaughtered as they work with systems they weren’t taught properly. When they do get the hang of things though, the battles don’t have the meat needed to make them satisfying to complete. The lack of variety and complexity is certainly an issue but the mechanics at the heart of the experience aren’t poorly conceived, just a bit too basic to carry an entire experience. However, with the other issues like odd touch screen control on top of those basics, LEGO Battles: Ninjago is not a good fit for baby’s first RTS nor is it a low-pressure time-waster for those who know the genre already.