The tag-team of Traveller's Tales Games and the Danish kiddy bricks company LEGO is an advertiser's dream. Using two incredibly lucrative brand names (LEGO and Star Wars) to sell a product on the highly profitable games market is sheer marketing genius. Thankfully, as people who try to escape from the depressing realities of capitalism by playing games, us gamers don't have to worry about these fiscal issues quite so much.

TT is attempting to pull the same stunt again with their latest bite at the apple, Bionicle Heroes. Is it similar to LEGO Star Wars? You're darn flamin' right it is. Bionicle is actually another toy line from LEGO for a start. The various Bionicle figures are a twist on the LEGO Technic toy lines... they take me back. I was never quite bright enough to figure out how to make a car's engine out of LEGO though - my parents bought me fudge instead.

The story behind Bionicle actually has a wealth of depth to it. As well as the toy lines, a number of films have been made and there are some comic book style story-arcs on the Bionicle website to follow. Needless to say, the storylines seem to change from year to year in ways that mean a whole new toy line simply must be released, but that's just an unfortunate bi-product of a writer's creative freedom; right?

Anyway, the stories of Bionicle centre on the heroic and robotic Toa Inika, who have a strange obsession with masks and spend their time defending the land of Voya Nui, and its inhabitants the Matoran, from the evil Piraka. As with the LEGO Star Wars games, it's only possible to fully understand the plot of Bionicle Heroes if you at least have a vague idea of the storylines that they're built upon. Levels start and finish with comical cut-scenes where the characters make inaudible murmurs and grunts, but this isn't quite so accessible to those of us who aren't accustomed to the various characters' intricacies.

TT has opted for a third person viewpoint to the gaming, although this is much less seamlessly integrated than in LEGO Star Wars. Your view is positioned just behind your Toa's right shoulder and your freedom of movement tends to feel quite confined, especially when you compare it to the widely varied camera angles in LEGO Star Wars.

There are six Toa which you play as and each one has different weaponry, abilities, speed and agility. Like in LEGO Star Wars, you constantly switch between these characters throughout a level depending on which character's attributes are suited to the task at hand. For example, you might need Hahli to cross a river, followed by Matoro to snipe a lever behind a locked door and open it. Unfortunately, this is never quite as engaging as using Obi-Wan's force powers to move a ramp into place so that C3PO can walk up it and hack into a computer terminal. This is partly because Star Wars is simply much cooler than Bionicle, but also because the variations aren't implemented quite as seamlessly in Bionicle Heroes.

Each Toa has one weapon and the type of weapon varies from one Toa to another. There's what are best described as a grenade launcher, a sniper rifle and an inaccurate but rapid firing machine gun to name a few. This should be enough variation to keep most of us happy, or at least that is how it might seem. Because each Toa auto-locks onto targets with its eyes (too easily unfortunately), each weapon ends up feeling more like the others than it should do. The auto-lock element is obviously included to make the game more accessible to a younger audience, but it does end up taking away the uniqueness of each weapon when TT appears to have put quite a bit of effort into setting them apart from each other.

Instead of collecting LEGO studs, as in LEGO Star Wars, you collect LEGO pieces. Once you have accumulated a certain amount in a level then your Toa transform into hero mode where they become golden Toa. This is not that exciting though because, apart from letting out a shock wave upon transformation that kills a few enemies around you, the golden Toa don't really have any special abilities above that of their less heroic steel counterparts other than cooler backing music.

Similarly to LEGO Star Wars, once again, you can exchange the LEGO pieces you have collected for various upgrades in the shop. These include power-ups to individual Toa such as improved weaponry, armour and abilities. Basically, you can upgrade your Toa so that they are stronger and do more damage, but not much more than that. There are a wide range of other unlockables such as bonus areas, game hints and constructible items. Again though, these unlockables are just not as desirable as their LEGO Star Wars counterparts.

The upgrades for each Toa are quite well integrated into the game though, as some areas are only accessible once you have upgraded a Toa to a particular point. Also, each level will usually have a boss battle with a Piraka and once you've defeated it, you can then use it in other levels. TT have cleverly built in alternative sections for these Piraka, which makes fans of the game want to play through again so that they can collect all the bonus items like gold and silver canisters. These ideas have clearly been pulled from LEGO STAR WARS where certain areas are only accessible to certain figures, such as Stormtroopers for example.

Bionicle Heroes, just like LEGO Star Wars, is aimed at the younger gaming audience. However, what made LEGO Star Wars so successful was that it attracted young and older gamers alike because Star Wars has such a loyal following, and LEGO Star Wars was a fairly funny alternative take on the films. The depth of gameplay was never the strongpoint in LEGO Star Wars, and the gameplay in Bionicle Heroes is even shallower. What's more, the franchise of Bionicle behind Bionicle Heroes simply cannot carry it anywhere near as far as Star Wars did for LEGO Star Wars.