Lego Fusion Battle Towers is a modest idea executed modestly. Like the other Lego Fusion kits we've reviewed, Town Master and Create & Race, Battle Towers presents the idea of scanning your creations into a mobile game. The $34.99 building set is based around a very simple shooter without a lot of meat to it, putting it a few steps behind the comparatively deep Town Master set, even when considering both are limited by two-dimensional builds. Battle Towers still uses Lego bricks to build things in the game, which at least keeps it pretty far ahead of Create & Race. Unfortunately, it seems that this first wave of Lego Fusion kits simply won't live up to the potential of its concept: combining physical Lego creations with a video game.

Building the Tower
Battle Towers comes with 212 pieces, including the AR tag necessary for the game. The related, eponymous Battle Towers game is available for free on iOS and Android, but requires the AR tag to function. The other parts include a good variety of gray, green, brown, beige, and black blocks that can be used to make tower levels of different shapes and styles. There are even several different pieces for arches and windows that can make a difference in the Battle Towers game itself.

To build tower sections in Tower Master, you don't actually construct entire floors; 212 pieces likely wouldn't be enough for that. Instead, you build a facade of each floor, creating a single layer of bricks on the single row of pegs on the included AR tag. Each section can measure up to 16 bricks tall and 16 pegs wide, but there is no depth involved.

When you scan your tower section into the game, it reads the AR tag and analyzes the bricks you placed on it. It then extrapolates that 2D image of a tower wall into an entire tower section, complete with windows, arches, and buttresses on all sides.

The accuracy of the scan seems to be dependent on the lighting around where you shoot, and perhaps on the app's own mood. When it's accurate, it picks up every block and places it in the game as it should be. When it's not, it drops bricks or misreads colors, often resulting in giant holes in walls. You can scan and re-scan your constructions as much as you want, but it can get frustrating if the bricks aren't lit just right.

The Game
The Battle Towers game itself is a tower defense game in the most literal and inaccurate sense. Traditional tower defense games have players place towers along paths toward a target, using the towers' defenses to stop waves of enemies. Battle Towers involves defending the tower you build. You place new floors on your tower with each wave, populating them with tower denizens that attack enemies or provide different bonuses. Archers fire arrows, spearmen throw spears, wizards casts spells, builders repair the tower as it gets damaged, and so on.