Kombo's Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don't waste your time. This is why we've split our reviews into four sections: What the Game's About, What's Hot, What's Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.

What the Game's About
LEGO Battles is a video game in which the title tells you everything you need to know. You fight in battles between a bunch of different LEGO lines. Pirates, Castle and Space are all playable LEGO sets through 70 missions. The gameplay is a straight-laced RTS making full use of the DS's touchpad to facilitate some resource gathering, unit building battles.

What's Hot
One of the hardest game genres to nail down outside the PC realm is real time strategy games. The DS is a natural fit because you can interact directly with the screen and issue commands quickly and efficiently. LEGO Battles is a textbook example of how to create a RTS game using the tools available on the DS. Selecting units is as simple as drawing a box around what you want to select. Tap to move and tap an enemy to attack, it really is as intuitive and easy as that. Having this level of command for a game of this manner is refreshing.

The LEGO universe itself is very creative. Kids from age 5 to 105 love the multicolored bricks. The most important thing is that LEGOS can't take themselves too seriously and they don't in LEGO Battles. The cut scenes are like silent slapstick movies that are laugh out loud funny. The 2D-based sprites used in the game fit along with the charm of the LEGO universe.



What's Not
All is not well in the land of LEGO, and I'm not just talking about skeletons trying to invade the King's Castle. The biggest, single most frustrating problem in all of LEGO Battles is the fact that path-finding is incredibly unpolished. When you try to move your group of soldiers across large swaths of land, they'll get stuck on the smallest parts of the map. You need to tap short distances and, even then, some of your units will get hung up on edges of boundaries. RTS games thrive on being able to fluidly move groups quickly. With LEGO Battles fumbling this basic necessity, they should have changed the level design to accommodate the poor path-finding.

LEGO Battles is also an easy game. It reduces the stress of the bad path-finding because the enemies are as smart as a box of rocks. Winning any mission involves building up a large army full of the best units and marching them down to the enemy base. That is as much strategy as you'll need because getting the required blocks to build isn't difficult since the main resources are plentiful. March in, march out and win the map is all that it takes to win without much strategy to plan.

Final Word
The novelty of controlling LEGO pieces in an RTS fashion never wears off in LEGO Battles. The bones of the game are brittle and frail since the basics of a RTS games are never fully realized but LEGO Battles will be remembered in case studies as an experiment of how to implement RTS controls into a DS game.