LEGO Battles Nintendo DS Nintendo Review

The single-player campaign is split into six stories, each of which consists of three acts containing numerous missions. Each story is introduced with a wonderful animated cut-scene chock full of Lego-branded humour, and offers at least a couple of hours of content as well as a unique Lego army - from pirates to wizards to aliens and beyond - to play with. Mission types include rescues, artifact collections and last man standing encounters, amongst others. Most of these are fairly mundane, and a few tend to overstay their welcome, but they serve their purpose and the game never leaves you confused about what you should be doing next.

This leaves you free to focus on more important things, such as building your base. Each army has its own take on the standard building types, but they all offer the same basic RTS functionality: unit and vehicle creation, resource gathering, etc.. A selection of defensive structures such as walls and upgradeable turrets also come in handy when completing certain objectives. Buildings tend to be easily distinguishable from one another, and their construction is simple and intuitive thanks to the DS' touch screen. The result is a smooth and enjoyable base-building process that requires a minimum of effort on your part.

Controlling your army, on the other hand, is a little more challenging. The general mechanics work well enough: you can select a group of units by dragging a box around them on the touch screen, and a few handy shortcuts - such as double-tapping a unit to select all units of that type, and issuing orders to patrol or guard - helps to keep things fluid. Unfortunately, with a maximum of around twenty units under your control at any one time, picking out a face in the crowd on the DS' small screens can be quite a challenge, and micro-management often becomes an almost impossibly tricky process, particularly during the heat of battle.

The game's larger (and arguably largest) shortfall, however, is its wayward path finding. Traversing the larger maps in particular can be an extremely frustrating process. Attempting to order your army to move from one side of the map to the other will almost always result in a selection of units bumping into trees and others obstacles before coming to a complete standstill. As a result of this, you'll generally need to keep an eye on units as they're moving and be prepared to constantly re-issue movement commands to get around obstructions. Naturally, this greatly reduces your ability to multi-task successfully, and the game suffers for it.