Don't get me wrong, I like LEGO Battles. It's a fairly solid, if simple RTS game. You have objectives, and can build bases, go out and smite thine enemies, et cetera. It's been dumbed down a bit, partially to cater to the younger players, and also to compensate for the fact that a more complex RTS needs a much larger screen, as well as a more complex control scheme. It's definitely not pushing any boundaries, but there's nothing wrong with that whatsoever.
My problem with it, however, is that there is no reason for it to be LEGO branded. The characters that were represented could have easily just been knights and pirates and whatever from a different art style, with the exact same story, without losing anything. In fact, the pixelization of lego blocks sometimes looked worse than an art style focused on pixelization, and was very noticeable at some points. There wasn't even the personalization aspect in the LEGO racers game I played, wherein you could design your own car. It's a LEGO branded game, with none of the things that actually make LEGO fun. After a while, I started to feel like I was just playing an extended commercial for the LEGO pirate, space, and castle sets, rather than playing a game that was supposed to be based off of those source materials. Even a cursory mechanic wherein you have to build your units out of larger pieces would have been interesting.
To be fair, though, I wouldn't have bought this game if not for the LEGO branding (and my discount). It's actually the only RTS I've heard of for the DS, which is surprising given the DS's potential for strategy gaming. It is unfortunate that for the game to even be recognized, it had to have an existing IP shoehorned into it, without much consideration of what makes the IP popular. However, when playing through it, I feel a sense of dissonance because I'm expecting RTS fun combined with LEGO fun and only getting one. This happens less frequently nowadays, especially since the "bad old days" where almost every movie had a boilerplate 2d platformer to go along with it are gone, but it is still unfortunate when it happens.
What I'd like to see, going forward, is that when a game is based around a specific IP, that the developers take the characteristics of that IP into account when making their game. I mean, honestly, a LEGO game with no more building than Starcraft? It's akin to making a Transformers game where the main characters are all humans, and not giant robots.
This is actually a problem I've been running into with creating a "campaign" for Hexcape, to be used in a box set. I designed the rules to be IP-independent, so my current attempts to make an IP around these rules that make sense seems forced. Striking a balance between total IP independance, which can give a ruleset a breadth of applications and IP dependence, wherein the rules are so engrained into the IP that there isn't any potential for independent expansion, is a difficult task indeed. Like just about everything else in this process, however, it has been a great learning experience indeed.
