Lego Alpha Team - Game Boy Color - Review

These days it feels like barely a month goes by without a new LEGO video game being released. Back in the late nineties however games based around the Scandinavian bricks and minifigs were still a relatively new concept and whilst early titles such as LEGO Racers and LEGO Rock Raiders had received mediocre reviews at best, sales were still strong and so a wave of new games were quickly put into development. LEGO Alpha Team was one such game and would release for the Game Boy Color in the year 2000, a month after it would land on the PC.

The Game Boy Color adaptation is, all things considered a fairly faithful port of the light strategy-puzzle game which sees an elite team of heroes trying to overthrow a mildly perilous baddie named Ogel. The team, led by Agent Dash must use their respective specialist skills to break into Ogel’s compound and stop production of his mind control orbs. Such peril.

The player doesn’t have direct control of Dash and Co and must instead manipulate and alter the environment to create a clear path to enable the team to complete each of the game’s 32 missions. Basically you are the kid playing with his Alpha Team LEGO set. The objective is the same in each mission; activate the exit plunger. Your crack team of special agents however can only do one thing unaided and that’s walk forward in a straight line. Without your intervention they will walk blindly into the first obstacle they come across and stop dead which doesn’t seem all that ‘alpha’ really. Even runway models know to how to turn around, but they then they are made of plastic I suppose. The LEGO that is.

After a short brief each mission begins with an overview of the map and then it’s time to begin planning. At this point the action is paused and the player will have control of a cursor which can be moved around with the D-Pad. Rather conveniently, scattered around each map will be exactly what you need to help the agent or agents reach the plunger in the form of various tiles and objects. By pressing A the tiles and objects can be picked up, moved around, and placed elsewhere. Certain objects such as stairs and direction tiles can also be rotated with the B button.

And when I say you are given exactly what you need, I mean exactly. If you think you’ve solved the level but you’ve got a piece left over, you haven’t solved the level. The game is incredibly rigid in its problem solving, which does seem something a missed opportunity seeing as LEGO is something you would normally associate with creativity.

Early missions are a simple as placing a few direction changing tiles to send Dash around a few turns and then on to the plunger, but as the game progresses more interesting items and complex solutions are soon required. Stairs, springboards, trampolines are needed to leap over gaps and climb walls.

To begin with the player only has Dash to worry about as the other members of the team are all being held hostage throughout the base. As you complete missions other members are freed and not only must be used to clear future stages but also bring with them new objects to play with.

Crunch brings with him explosives which can be used to destroy breakable walls, Radia brings lasers which can activate otherwise unreachable plungers, and can also be angled with carefully placed mirrors. Charge brings generators which can be used to power anti-gravity units (which act much the same as a trampoline) and can also be used to power lasers from a distance. As you get towards the end of the game you’ll have to manage several team members, as well a combination of the previously mentioned items to activate several plungers in each mission.

These later levels are when the game starts to come into its own as much of the early missions can feel far too much like an extended tutorial with any ambiguity about how to complete the level often being removed by the overly helpful mission brief.

It’s worth keeping in mind that target audience for LEGO Team Alpha was probably the under 10’s and for that demographic this is a certainly decent take on a strategic puzzle game. For anyone older however there isn’t much to recommend here. Most missions are a simple matter of going through the motions with the vast majority of solutions being far too easy to figure out and with each stage only having one solution there isn’t any real incentive to replay levels either.

Visually the game is bright and colourful as you’d expect from a LEGO game, with the backgrounds looking fairly varied and interesting. The isometric viewpoint can be something of a pain though with the usual issues with depth perception being common. On the audio front the game has very little to offer with the same short loops being used throughout the game.

Overall LEGO Alpha Team is a decent enough attempt to bring a light strategy title to the game boy color, but its emphasis on light and simplistic problem solving, and its excessive handholding holds it back from being an experience worth revisiting. For those looking for something similar with a bit more depth I’d suggest checking out my Chicken Run review and maybe picking that up instead.

Nevertheless the game is mildly entertaining for a day or two and can be picked up cheaply and easily so if you like what you’ve heard why not pick up a copy and help Dash and his alpha team of agents shut down Ogel’s mind control facility once and for all.