Lego’s Smart Play Pokémon can train and battle but never say their name

When Lego announced its tech-packed Bricks at CES, we were blown away by the possibilities — enough to give it a go. Best in Show Award. But when the first Star Wars really sets up was launched in Marchwe were not too impressed. All the promise of smart interaction and smart games finally came to the sound of a few voices and bright lights, and the most intelligent things that we have not seen at CES anywhere.

Today, Lego announced the second generation, with 12 new sets launching this summer, promising Pokémon play and some of the smarts we’ve been missing. After a few hours of training and fighting with the new sets this morning, it’s clear Smart Brick and to be smart, but Lego is slowly making good on its January promises — and it’s still trying to launch one of its best-known products: sound effects.

The 12 sets announced today are available for pre-order nowbut it doesn’t go on sale until August 1st. Only two sets are “all-in-one,” meaning that they include one Smart Brick and a charger, giving you everything you need to use smart things: $69.99 Pikachu with a price tag and one Smart Brick, and $119.99 a battle with Charizard and Jolteon that includes two Smart Bricks. The other 10 sets, ranging from the $14.99 Jigglypuff to the $89.99 battle between Cubone and Gengar, are what Lego calls “compatible” — which means they include Smart Tags that can trigger certain effects and interactions, but not the Smart Bricks that are required to make everything work.

Lego has been working to add some of the more challenging action that was missing from the first Star Wars set, the most exciting being the ability to have two Pokémon battles. Shaking two Pokémon figures connected to Smart Bricks — and yes, you’ll need two bricks, meaning buying Charizard armor or something from the Star Wars line — triggers a Battle. When the 8-bit war music plays, children can fight by driving these two figures in the air: pushing forward quickly causes rapid damage, returning the figure for a few seconds and driving it hard, and pulling it back to avoid damage. After a minute or two of back-and-forth, one Pokémon will win, with flashing lights and winning music.

Federico Begher, Lego’s SVP of product development and marketing, said the battle is deliberately simple. The four basic mechanics — shaking to start a fight, two types of attacks, and sneaking — are the “sweet spot” in the open-world gameplay that “can’t be too hard, can’t be overwhelming.” This is far from a fighting game, but there is a bit of skill involved, especially in knowing how to dodge and learning when to use a threat.

There and a little more is going on behind the scenes as well. Not all Pokémon are created equal, and some are stronger than others. Mewtwo should have a limit on Pikachu, after all. Color advantage also comes into play, so Squirtle beats Charmander more often than not. Each Pokémon’s Smart Tag, hidden inside its body except when you add or remove a Smart Brick, shows its type(s) along with its Pokédex number, and different types of Pokémon also make different sounds – lightning from Pikachu, water rushing from Lapras.

Then there is education. Tapping a Pokémon on the training tag puts it in training mode, while holding it against the targets created in the sets (or other objects of your choice, or just swinging it in the air – the accelerometer in the Smart Brick does a lot of work here) will raise your Pokémon, making it stronger for its next battle. Before you get too excited, this isn’t permanent: power-ups from training only last until the Smart Brick is removed from the Pokémon (or its battery dies), so you won’t be able to train the team after a while. A representative of Lego said that this is part of the design – in testing, children are happy to repeat the lessons from the beginning – although I suspect that they often hinder the Smart Brick technology itself.

That limitation is also to blame for the obvious difficulties of these new groups: none of these Pokémon have their own names, nor do they make a direct, recognizable sound from the game or cartoons. That’s it one something I wanted Lego Pikachu to do, and it can’t, instead it’s talking a lot of sounds and the odd electric power. There was a similar limitation in the previous Star Wars sets, which had the heavy breathing of Darth Vader but no obvious sounds of lasers and minifigs. The limits of technology come down to the brick synthesizer, which produces sounds in real time using a mechanism similar to MIDI, and its limited memory, which forced Lego to not suffer from the volume of sounds it carried. Pikachu may be Pikachu wherever you go, but Squirtle is Zenigame in Japan. Unlike the game, Lego bricks are not generic, so any logic should work wherever the toys are played with. Kids will have to say “pika pika” to themselves to avoid hearing a Pokémon name that doesn’t make sense to them. Maybe that’s why Luke Skywalker didn’t speak anymore – not every child is expected to speak English.

The 12 sets vary in size and difficulty, from Jigglypuff’s 88 weapons to 831 in the battle between Umbreon and Garchomp, though many have some moving parts, such as Gengar’s swinging tongue. Some of these major groups are rated 10+, even the easiest ones are six or more. Larger sets can also create larger Pokémon, though they all remain unequal in battle. They’re tough, and the Lego workers I spoke to all said that the kits went through repeated testing and iteration to minimize their weak points, but since training and combat all involve knocking out figures quickly, they’re likely to break. A bad hit mid-battle saw my Charmander knocked out by a pesky Bulbasaur, though luckily Lego had a “toy doctor” to fix it in advance. What is not clear is the difference when you pull a Pokémon from one group to connect with a support from outside the battle – they should work together, but I didn’t have enough time to play to see the amount of uniqueness caused by the strange combination.

The Pokémon Smart Play kits are a clear step from the Star Wars options for battles alone, which create screen-free gameplay in and around the open game. But Lego still releases sets that use other features the most advanced devices that showed at CESincluding interactions that change based on the exact location of characters, tags, and bricks. This feels like a step forward, proof that Smart Play can offer more than just lighting and sound effects, even if its true potential is yet to be realized.

Photography by Dominic Preston/The Verge