Lego Smart Play-Pokémon can train and fight, but don't do what I would have liked.

When Lego announced his technically packed Smart Bricks at the CES, we were impressed by their potential – enough to give them our Best in Show Award. But when the first Star Wars sets actually came to the market in March, we were less enthusiastic. All this promise of clever interaction and creative game was ultimately limited to a few belly voices and flashing lights, while the smartest features we had seen on the CES were nowhere to find. Legos Smart Play Pokémon can train and fight, but don't do what I would have liked.

Why, oh why, can Pikachu not say “Pika Pika”? Legos Smart Play Pokémon can train and fight, but don't do what I would have liked.

Why, oh why, can Pikachu not say “Pika Pika”? Today, Lego announced the second generation, with 12 new sets that come to the market this summer and Pokémon promises and promise some of the smarts we missed. After a few hours of training and fighting with the new sets this morning it is clear that the Smart Brick is getting smarter and smarter, but Lego goes the slow way to exploit the potential promised in January – and still has difficulty implementing one of his most obvious selling arguments: official sound effects. The 12 sets announced today can be pre-ordered as of now, but only on 1 August. Only two sets are “All-in-One”, i.e. they contain at least one Smart Brick and a charger and offer everything you need to use the smart features: a Pikachu set with a tree house and a Smart Brick for $69.99 and a fight set with Glurak and Ruck, which contains two Smart Bricks, for $119.99. The other 10 sets, from a Jigglypuff for $14.99 to a fight between Cubone and Gengar for $89.99, are what Lego calls “compatible” – that is, they contain smart tags that can trigger certain effects and interactions, but not the Smart Bricks that are required to operate the whole. Lego has worked to add some of the complex interactions that were lacking in the first Star Wars sets, especially the possibility of having two Pokémon compete against each other. The shaking of two Pokémon figures connected with Smart Bricks – and yes, you need two stones, that is, you buy either the Glurak set or something from the Star Wars series – triggers the combat mode. While 8-bit combat music is played, children can fight by driving the two characters through the air: A quick forward thrust triggers a quick attack with little damage, holding back the figure for a few seconds invites to a stronger movement and retracting allows evasion to avoid damage. After one or two minutes of the back and forth, a Pokémon will triumph with flashing lights and victory music. Federico Begher, SVP for product and marketing development at Lego, said that the struggle was deliberately easy. The four basic mechanisms – shaking to start a fight, two types of attacks and evasions – are “the sweet spot” in a kind of open-end game that “cannot be too complicated and not overwhelming”. This is far from a complete replica of the round-based battles of the games, but there is at least a little skill behind it, especially in mastering the evasion and learning when to use the attack. Behind the scenes is also a little more. Not all Pokémon are the same and some are naturally stronger than others. Mewtu should always have an advantage over Pikachu. The type advantage also applies, so that Squirtle Glumanda will beat more frequently. The smart day of every Pokémon hidden in its body, except when you add or remove the Smart Brick, displays its type(s) along with its Pokédex number, and various Pokémon types also generate different sound effects – a flash charge for Pikachu, the noise of water from Lapras. Then there's training. When you tap a Pokémon on the training day, it is put into the training mode. If you then tap it against targets built into sets (or other objects of your choice) or just swing it in the air – the accelerometer in Smart Brick does the most work here), your Pokémon will be brought to a higher level and stronger in the next fight. Before you get too excited: Nothing of this is permanent: The power boost through the training lasts only until the Smart Brick is removed from this Pokémon (or its battery is empty), so you cannot train a group over time. A Lego representative said that this was intended in part – in their tests children like to repeat the training loop from scratch – although I suspect that this is largely braked by the technological limits of the Smart Bricks themselves. These limitations are partly also responsible for the most obvious drawback of these new sets: none of these Pokémon says their own name and they also do not make any specific, recognizable sounds from the games or cartoons. That's the only thing I expected from Lego Pikachu, and it just can't, but instead there are generic living noises and the strange electricity effect of itself. There were similar limits in the previous Star Wars sets, where Darth Vader's heavy breathing, but no recognizable sounds for lasers and minifigures were to be heard. Sam Coates, head of the Smart Play platform, told me that the technological boundaries are due to the runtime synthesizer of the modules that generates real-time sounds using a MIDI-like system, and to its small memory that forces Lego to save in the number of built-in sound effects. He told me that there is another practical problem: not all Pokémon have the same names and sounds around the world. Pikachu may be Pikachu everywhere, but Squirtle is Zenigame in Japan. Unlike the games, Lego's stones are not site-bound and therefore all sound effects must work wherever the toys are played. Children themselves have to say “Pika Pika” to avoid hearing a Pokémon name that doesn’t sound right for them. Maybe Luke Skywalker hasn't spoken, not every child expects him to speak English. The 12 sets vary in size and complexity, from an 88-piece Jigglypuff kit to 831 in a fight between Umbreon and Garchomp, although most have at least some moving parts, such as Gengar's threatening winding tongue. Some of these larger sets are suitable for children from 10 years old, while the easier ones are suitable for children from six years old. The larger sets also tend to build larger Pokémon, although all remain interoperable in the fight. They are relatively robust, and all Lego staff I spoke to said that the kits have undergone repeated game tests and iterations to limit their vulnerabilities. However, as training and fighting is about throwing around the figures at high speed, they will probably break apart sometime. In an unfortunate collision in the middle of the fight, my Charmander was destroyed by a hard-ass Bulbasaur, although Lego fortunately had a “toy doctor” for spontaneous repairs. What's even less clear is how much variety there is when you pull a Pokémon out of a set to interact outside fights with a prop from another – they should always work together, but I didn't have enough time to see how many unique effects are triggered by unusual combinations. Compared to the Star Wars options, the Pokémon Smart Play sets represent a significant advance in complexity, just due to the struggles that create a level of screen-free gameplay in and around the creative game with an open end. But Lego still has to extract sets that use some of the more advanced features it has shown on CES, including interactions that change depending on the exact positioning of characters, tags and stones. This feels like progress, proof that Smart Play can offer more than just flashing lights and noises, even if its true potential is not yet exhausted. Photography by Dominic Preston / The Verge

Update, June 2: Slideshow with details added to each set. Most popular

– These are the first Nvidia RTX Spark laptops

- The new AI agency Gemini is about as good as the demo of Google- Gemini Spark is the most impressive and frightening AI experience I had before

– This could be the M1 moment of Windows be – but it is expected to cost a lot

- Nvidia announces RTX Spark as “the most efficient PC chip ever”