A Cross Between Legos and Skylanders, Sick Bricks Is Your Kid’s Next Obsession

Daniel Howley
·Technology Editor
Updated

A Cross Between Legos and Skylanders, Sick Bricks Is Your Kid’s Next Obsession

A new kind of toy is coming in March, and it’s going to suck the money right out of your wallet. Spin Master’s Sick Bricks features Lego-style figurines that you scan into a companion iOS or Android game, through which you battle them against hordes of aliens in a bid to protect Sick City.

New genre brings toys to life

Sick Bricks is the latest in the toys-to-life genre of playthings that takes action figures and lets you connect them to a video game console, where they appear onscreen for you to control. It’s a merging of toys and video games, and we think kids will want it.

Toys-to-life games are not new: The best example of this has been Activision’s Skylanders games, which basically print money for the company. It’s made more than $2 billion off of the series. Then there are Nintendo’s amiibos and Disney’s Infinity games.

Even Lego is getting into the act, with its Lego Fusion line. It lets you build a house or medieval tower and scan it into a companion app, through which you can have Lego figures interact with them.

image

Photo: Darren Weaver

Welcome to Sick City

The problem with these toys-to-life games so far is that they require you to buy figurines plus an expensive video game console. Sick Bricks, on the other hand, relies on an iOS or Android device and figurines that cost $2.50 a piece, which is cheap in the category.

Scanning a figure into the Sick Bricks game is as easy as pointing your smartphone or tablet camera at it and holding still for a moment, while the app recognizes your character.

Sick Bricks also lets players swap pieces between figurines to create new characters with new powers. You can have an astronaut, a zombie, or a zombie astronaut. You can stack figures and scan them to create superpowered characters.

image

Photo: Darren Weaver

Players can also buy specialized Sick Bricks accessories, including large aliens, sharks, and rafts, which can also be scanned into the game.

To get kids frothing at the mouth for Sick Bricks figures, Spin Master will also have a Sick Bricks show on Cartoon Network.

In other words, your wallet is about to get a lot lighter.

Email Daniel at dhowley@yahoo-inc.com; follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley or on Google+.