Game Review: Lego Battles: Ninjago

Billy O'Keefe - Mclatchy -Tribune News Service

For: Nintendo DS

From: Hellbent Games/TT Games/WB Games

ESRB Rating: Everyone (cartoon violence)

Inevitably, somebody was going to wise up and design a real-time strategy game that would allow kids and absolute novices to cut their teeth on the genre without getting completely demoralized in the process.

Arguably, "Lego Battles: Ninjago" succeeds at doing exactly that. Just as arguably, though, it goes overboard in its attempt to do so.

Conceptually and structurally, "Ninjago" has its head in the right place. The Lego license, and TT Games' impressive aptitude for mining it for comedic storytelling, gets the storytelling off to an entertaining start before passing the baton to the tutorial.

From here, "Ninjago" demonstrates a fundamental understanding of how to create a strategy game that feels like its bigger-budget contemporaries without overwhelming new players the way those games would. Controls work as you expect via the touch screen, and while the smaller screen sometimes makes it tricky to select specific units precisely, it works pretty well with practice. That holds true as well for the overlying interface, which lays out a host of management tools - a mini-map, resource tallies, build queues, objectives and more - in a way that's easy to manage and rarely intrusive.

Unfortunately, where "Ninjago" goes a bit too far in the user-friendliness department is in the action itself, which rarely provides players with any serious adversity to overcome.

Too many missions force players to seek and attack rather than defend, which tends to limit the amount of creativity you can apply to your battle plan. That'd be unfortunate even if "Ninjago" provided you with fair fights to win, but there is almost never an instance in which your troops do not outnumber and overpower the enemy battalion by several degrees.

Short of malicious neglect of your troops, it's awfully hard to lose a fight, and even kids who are completely green in the art of troop management should back their way into conquests with little trouble. Contemporary kids' games are generally bad about underestimating the abilities of their audience, and while "Ninjago's" lack of credit is no more offensive than that of other kids' games, it's harder for a slower-paced game like this to hide it.

The sum total is a game that's impressive and underwhelming all at once. Ultimately, until a better challenger comes along, it's still easy to recommend to kids who want to graduate to "StarCraft" someday but have nothing to play with in the meantime. Even with the disappointing lack of difficulty, "Ninjago" succeeds in providing a pretty spot-on introduction to real-time strategy games, and between the story mode and a secondary skirmish mode that includes a handful of popular match types (tower defense, capture the flag, king of the hill and more), it's definitely comprehensive.

Provided you have a friend with a second copy of the game, "Ninjago's" two-player local wireless multiplayer is the best news of all. All the single-player skirmish matches make the move over to this area, and even the most unseasoned human opponent should provide a more unpredictable resistance than the A.I. does. It's in this department where "Ninjago" most closely reaches its potential as a strategy game that doesn't play down to its audience. Unfortunately, because you need one copy of the game per system, it's also the one area players are most likely to never experience.

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