Fighting brick-built baddies with the Lego Ultra Agents app
Lego's Ultra Agents fight crime with your help in an interactive app that adds comics, games and alternative building instructions for your toys.
Lego's Ultra Agents are protecting The City from assorted studded supervillains, and you can help them with a new interactive app that combines comics and games to take down baddies brick by brick.
The app is free for iOS and Android, and tells the story of the Ultra Agents range of Lego toys. Lego, first sold in Denmark in 1949, consists of interlocking bricks of different shapes and sizes that you use to build vehicles, buildings or just about anything you want.
Having spun off into a series of video games and a blockbuster movie, Lego's latest digital outing is the new Ultra Agents app. The app includes six episodes of an interactive comic, one for each of the sets in the Ultra Agents range. Each episode has voice acting and sound effects and you interact with the comic by swiping through each panel and seeking out clues to the next scene.
There's a game in each episode too, which give you simple tasks in order to advance the plot, like shooting a baddie's vehicle or correctly matching a light-up sequence. And once you've completed the app, you're rewarded with alternative instructions to rebuild your Lego set into a cool new vehicle.
To test the app, we built the biggest set, the Mission HQ truck. Mission HQ is a big rig pulling a trailer that opens to reveal computers, lab equipment, a radar dish, a robot arm and more cool kit to help the Ultra Agents battle evil. Evil comes in the form of a mecha walker with one arm that spins menacingly, and another that fires small green balls at a not inconsiderable velocity.
The set costs £80 in the UK, $100 in the US and AU$140 in Australia. Click through our gallery above to see the Mission HQ set and the app in action.
Five Lego characters, or minifigs, are included: Agent Curtis Bolt, Agent Caila Phoenix, Agent Solomon Blaze, Professor Christina Hydron, and the nefarious Terabyte. The set also includes a reconnaissance drone and a jeep that launches from the trailer down a ramp.
Building Mission HQ is a mission in itself -- you get a lorra Lego with your Lego lorry. At one point we had three highly trained technology experts working in shifts and it still took a good few hours, so there's plenty to keep you occupied. The same is true once it's finished: the finished product has loads of cool little details and features to play with.
Kids will love the various details and bits they can play with, and if you're a bit older you might also enjoy the similarity with Optimus Prime and his folding trailer with its pop-out vehicle.
The Mission HQ is suitable for ages 9 to 14 (ahem), and as well as being bigger it features some advanced building, with a few bits borrowed from the more advanced Lego Technic sets.
It's all fairly straightforward however, even if you do need to pay attention when building bits like the sides of the truck that look the same but have slight differences. Building it is fun, especially as the little details like the microscope or the big rig's firing projectiles take shape. Admit -- you want one.