The LEGO Super Mario Series is great fun for families

What do you get when two titanic brands, Nintendo and LEGO, both famous for their ultra-protectiveness of their franchises, come together? The answer is not surprising at all: the LEGO Super Mario series.

Launched earlier this month, the Lego Super Mario series come with a compulsory Starter Kit that contains LEGO Mario himself. There are also 10 Lego Super Mario expansion sets, four power-up packs, and a selection of character packs. It goes without saying that you can’t play the Expansion sets without the Starter Kit.

I've had a selection from the range to play with for the past couple of weeks and it's fascinating stuff. So, the concept with LEGO Super Mario is that you can create your own Super Mario levels out of LEGO, with many of the famous obstacles and enemies from the games available to overcome, including Bowzer himself (available as an Expansion set, of course). To help you build each set, though, LEGO has gone in favour of digital instructions over traditional build guide booklets. These instructions are accessed through the LEGO Super Mario companion app that you can download on the Google Play Store or Apple’s App Store. And yes…that means a smartphone or tablet is required.

You might have also guessed it, this LEGO Super Mario series isn’t for fans or collectors of say, the LEGO Star Wars or Creator range. It’s really for kids but yet not like you would play with LEGO’s more youthful range such as the City range, where the fun comes from seeing minifigs and from building vehicles and props to play with in dioramas out of your own imagination.

Rather, the interactive Mario figure and the accompanying app work hard to combine the best and most fondly held characteristics of both LEGO construction sets and Super Mario games. LEGO Super Mario is a modular system that builds into another modular system. Rather than large, complex builds, it offers many small builds that make up the elements of a Mario level: a start pipe, a goal pole, an enemy or block to bop, a platform. You can then assemble these into courses of your own design and have Mario 'run' them.

So how does Mario determine what he is doing? Well, this is where we get to the core of how LEGO Super Mario works. On the bottom of Mario are sensors that continuously read what he is standing on. These sensors can recognise different colours of terrain (or bricks), and each set's special activity blocks. These activity blocks have readable patterns on them and are all connected with specific things – so there's an activity block on the mushroom's brick, for example, and when you place Mario on it, that gives Mario a mushroom – technically an extra life in this LEGO Mario toy.

The sensor also reads the colour of the LEGO piece Mario is standing on, and this is what determines which environment Mario is in. So, if Mario is standing on blue pieces, then his small chest screen will show water and the water sound effect from the NES game will play as if he is swimming. Equally, if he is standing on red LEGO bricks for example, then that represents lava and standing too long on them will cause Mario to let out an audible perish and it will be game over until the next run begins.

And talking of level runs, each level begins by touching Mario on his LEGO pipe and finished by having him standing on the end flag platform, just like you would in the NES game. As soon as Mario leaves his pipe, he has 60 seconds to reach the end flag, along the way avoiding or clearing obstacles – stomping on a Goomba or picking up the mushroom. Failure to reach the flag within the time limit and that run is a game over. As such, unless you want to be extremely fast, larger levels definitely benefit from extra time, which comes in the form of a time extender action block. If Mario stands on this block, then he gets 30 more seconds.

The sets (Starter Kit and Expansion sets), while not too complex to build, are so modular that I don’t get the same sense of satisfaction from other LEGO series sets and its layered designs that feel complete in my hands. But again, and I got to stress this, the LEGO Super Mario series is targeted at young kids and perhaps parents feeling nostalgic with one of the most iconic game character of the 80's – so clearly I’m an outlier here, despite my love for both LEGO and Nintendo.

That said, I can also appreciate LEGO and Nintendo having designed a new kind of play that sits somewhere between the physical creativity of LEGO and the digital interactions of Mario games. A hybrid between the touch interaction of a toy and the play of a videogame, if you will. The app is also superbly polish by the way – I let one of the page run continuously just to enjoy the in-game music – and while a two-player mode is missing, one can be forgiven for suspecting LEGO will release a Luigi or a Peach figure to pair up with Mario in the near future.

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