Ever since they were introduced at CES earlier this year, Lego has had to fight an uphill battle to convince increasingly skeptical audiences that its new “Smart Play” system—featuring electronic bricks that could light up and make sounds when interacting with specific tiles and minifigures—was the hot new future of playing with plastic bricks. From high prices to compromised set designs, it’s been a challenge to show that the additions smart bricks made in lights and sounds could make up for those weaknesses elsewhere.
But now, ahead of their release next week, it turns out that the smart bricks also just kind of sound terrible.
The initial wave of Star Wars Smart Play (and “Smart Play compatible”) sets has started making its way into people’s hands, allowing us to get a better picture of what the smart bricks themselves are capable of outside of tech demos and product pages. That means we can really hear what the sound functionality they can bring to the Lego play experience is—which Lego has previously explained as being able to recreate talking sounds, special effects like vehicle engines or refueling noises, or, especially in the case of Star Wars with the line being used to introduce the tech to the world, replicating iconic music and sound effects from the franchise.
Except… not exactly. There’s definitely fun stuff in the examples above, like the Muzak-y renditions of the Force theme and “The Imperial March” playing when Luke, Vader, and the Emperor are placed in proximity or the Dewback purring gently when you pet it or lay it on its side to “sleep.” But for the most part, what’s on offer is pretty grim. The engine sounds are all pretty generic and sound nothing like the Star Wars vehicles they’re meant to be emulating.
It’s the “talking” sounds that are really awful, sounding very similar regardless of whether it’s Luke, Leia, Vader, Han, the Emperor, Greedo, Yoda, or Obi-Wan all largely making the same warbling sounds at various pitches of modulating (if the smart brick’s synthesizer is so limited, surely we could’ve gotten something closer to the mumbles of the classic Lego Star Wars games over this?). The only one that gets out of it even remotely well is R2-D2, and that’s because he’s best known for beeps and boops and the occasional whistles.
But again, it’s difficult to separate Smart Play from what it can do, to varying degrees of success, from the extremely high cost of entry facing the platform right now. The sounds being a little funky and the lights atop the brick itself being kind of there would maybe be more palatable as the first iteration of a technology that wasn’t asking people—especially the parents of the kids these sets and functionalities are clearly aimed at—to pay $70 as the minimum entry point to Smart Play at all (there are cheaper “Smart Play Compatible” sets available that include smart minifigures and smart tags, but not the brick, meaning you’re paying their price plus the $70 it takes to get the cheapest set to actually include one). And if you want multiple bricks to make the most out of their interactivity, as weird as it is? It’s $160 for a set that has two or $140 if you don’t mind doubling up on the same set.
Asking people to pay all that—especially at a time when Lego prices are already pretty rough—only to get a product that not only doesn’t look as good as other Lego sets (for kids or adults alike) but also just sounds bad on top of all that as a fundamental feature feels like a disaster waiting to happen for Lego. Maybe the expectations wouldn’t be as high if Smart Play wasn’t introduced with a brand like Star Wars, filled with iconic sounds and music that generations of people have had burned into their minds for almost 50 years. But the price hurdle would likely still remain, and it would equally remain that you’re paying an awful lot of money for very little additive value in return.
Time will tell if Smart Play will be able to endure for longer than this wave of Star Wars sets and maybe even get the chance to iterate the technology into something closer to its big ideas. But for now, what the feature is offering just doesn’t seem to be worth it.
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