Lego’s Smart Play Pokémon can train and battle but won’t say their name

When Lego announced its tech-packed Smart Bricks at CES, we were impressed by the potential — enough to give it our Best in Show award. But when the first Star Wars sets actually launched in March, we were less enamored. All that promise of clever interaction and creative play ultimately boiled down to a few voice barks and flashing lights, with the smartest features we’d seen at CES nowhere to be found.

Today, Lego announced the second generation, with 12 new sets launching this summer, promising Pokémon play and some of the smarts we’d been missing. After a few hours training and battling with the new sets this morning, it’s clear the Smart Brick is getting smarter, but Lego is taking the slow road to delivering on the potential promised in January — and is still struggling to implement one of its most obvious selling points: official sound effects.

The 12 sets announced today are available to preorder now, but won’t go on sale until August 1st. Only two sets are “all-in-one,” meaning they include at least one Smart Brick and a charger, delivering everything you need to use the smart features: a $69.99 Pikachu set with a treehouse and one Smart Brick, and a $119.99 battle set featuring Charizard and Jolteon, which includes two Smart Bricks. The other 10 sets, ranging from a $14.99 Jigglypuff to an $89.99 battle between Cubone and Gengar, are what Lego calls “compatible” — that means they include Smart Tags that can trigger certain effects and interactions, but not the Smart Bricks needed to make the whole thing run.

Lego has worked to add some of the complex interactions that were missing from the first Star Wars sets, most excitingly in the ability to have two Pokémon battle. Shaking two Smart Brick-connected Pokémon figures together — and yes, you’ll need two bricks, meaning buying either the Charizard set or something from the Star Wars line — triggers Battle mode. As 8-bit battle music plays, kids can fight by driving the two figures at each other through the air: a quick thrust forward triggers a low-damage quick attack, holding the figure back for a few seconds charges up a stronger move, and pulling it back dodges to help avoid damage. After a minute or two of back-and-forth, one Pokémon will triumph, with flashing lights and victory music.

Federico Begher, Lego’s SVP of product and marketing development, said combat is intentionally simple. The four basic mechanics — shake to start a fight, two types of attack, and dodging — are “the sweet spot” in a type of open-ended play that “can’t be too complicated, can’t be overwhelming.” This is a far cry from a full recreation of the games’ turn-based combat, but there’s at least a little skill to it, mostly in mastering the dodge and learning when to use the charge attack.

There is a little more going on behind the scenes too. Not all Pokémon are created equal, and some are inherently stronger than others. Mewtwo should always have an edge over Pikachu, after all. Type advantage applies too, so Squirtle will beat Charmander more often than not. Each Pokémon’s Smart Tag, hidden inside its body except when you add or remove the Smart Brick, shows its type(s) along with its Pokédex number, and different type Pokémon make different sound effects too — a charge of lightning for Pikachu, the rush of water from Lapras.

Then there’s training. Tapping a Pokémon on the training tag puts it in training mode, at which point tapping it against targets built into the sets (or other objects of your choice, or simply waving it in the air — the accelerometer in the Smart Brick is doing most of the work here) will level your Pokémon up, making it stronger in 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 Pokémon (or its battery dies), so you can’t train up a squad over time. A Lego representative said that’s partly by design — in their testing, kids enjoy repeating the training loop from scratch — though I suspect it’s mostly held back by the technological limits of the Smart Brick itself.

Those limits are also partly to blame for these new sets’ most obvious drawback: none of these Pokémon say their own name, and nor do they make specific, recognizable noises from the games or cartoons. It’s the one thing I wanted Lego Pikachu to do, and it simply can’t, instead uttering generic critter sounds and the odd electricity effect. There were similar limits in the previous Star Wars sets, which had Darth Vader’s heavy breathing but no recognizable sounds for lasers and minifigs. The technological limits come down to the bricks’ runtime synthesizer, which generates sounds in realtime using a system similar to MIDI, and its diminutive memory, which forced Lego to be sparing in how many sound effects it packed in. There’s another practical concern though: Pokémon don’t all have the same names and noises worldwide. Pikachu may be Pikachu wherever you go, but Squirtle is Zenigame in Japan. Unlike the games, Lego’s bricks aren’t localized, and so any sound effects have to work wherever the toys are played with. Kids will have to say “pika pika” for themselves, to avoid ever hearing a Pokémon name that doesn’t sound right to them. Perhaps that’s why Luke Skywalker didn’t talk either — not every kid expects him to speak English.

The 12 sets range in size and complexity, from an 88-piece Jigglypuff kit to 831 in a battle between Umbreon and Garchomp, though most have at least some moving parts, like Gengar’s threateningly wagging tongue. Some of those larger sets are rated 10+, though the simpler ones are for six and older. The bigger sets tend to build bigger Pokémon too, though all of them remain interoperable in battles. They’re relatively sturdy, and the Lego staff I spoke to all said that the kits had gone through repeated playtesting and iterations to limit their weak spots, but since training and battling both involve knocking the figures around at speed, they’ll probably break apart eventually. An unfortunate mid-battle collision saw my Charmander demolished by a hard-hitting Bulbasaur, though fortunately Lego had a “toy doctor” on hand for impromptu repairs. What’s less clear yet is how much variety there is when you pull a Pokémon from one set to interact with a prop from another outside of battles — they should always work together, but I didn’t have enough playtime to see how many unique effects are triggered with unusual combinations.

The Pokémon Smart Play kits are a clear step up in complexity from the Star Wars options by virtue of the battles alone, which build a level of screen-free gameplay in and around the open-ended creative play. But Lego is still yet to release sets that use some of the more advanced features it showed off at CES, including interactions that alter depending on the precise positioning of characters, tags, and bricks. This feels like a step forward, proof that Smart Play can deliver more than just flashing lights and swooshing sounds, even if its true potential is yet to be realized.

Photography by Dominic Preston / The Verge