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Bringing 'Sick Brick' Toys to Life

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Sick Bricks is a new iOS game that is a little similar to both the Lego and Skylanders video-games. As a basic premise this ticks the right boxes, both in terms of the toy-game hybrid genre but also keeping things at the pocket money end of the value spectrum.

Getting the toys int he home and seeing the kids react to them there are some other nice touches as well. Because each character is made up of a head brick and a body brick you can mix and match the physical toys with each other to create new mash-ups. When these are put in front of the app camera it recognises the combination and creates a Skylanders Swap Force style customization.

There are then larger bricks that scan in as vehicles for your characters to get in a drive around. This is nice for families not only because it alters how the video-game plays but because it also creates more real world play as well.

This certainly hooked my kids who invented their own Sick Bricks Flick game, as you can see in the video, that is (as far as I can tell) a turn based Subbuteo combat game.

While the Sick Brick app is free there are in-app purchases. Here parents will want to make sure their password settings are up to scratch to ensure no unexpected purchases. In our playing, with a healthy stock of the physical toys we’ve not yet been tempted in in-app purchases so it feels like the balance is good here.

The characters themselves are also worth noting. Each is an irreverent take on classic gaming and movie genres. These range from the inane to the slightly rude. To get a better idea of the game here's my first 30 minutes with it:

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Andrew Robertson
Andy Robertson is the editor of AskAboutGames and has written for national press and broadcast about video games and families for over 15 years. He has just published the Taming Gaming book with its Family Video Game Database.