The early impressions about LEGO Battles (a new real-time strategy game for Nintendo DS) weren’t entirely positive, but Destructoid played the game at E3 2009 earlier this month and has a different viewpoint.

Conrad Zimmerman writes:

I’m looking forward to playing this, in part because it looks adorable but also because the simplification of what can often be a convoluted style of game really appeals to me. I avoid RTS games not because they aren’t really fun but because I can’t keep track of everything going on and wind up just getting wiped out when the second or third attack on my forces is made. LEGO Battles looks just simple enough to play that I may be picking this one up when it comes out.

LEGO® Battles is available for – Nintendo DS™ now.

Although LEGO Battles for Nintendo DS was announced back in February, details so far have been sparse.

Kotaku had a five-minute look at the game yesterday and has some pre-release impressions.

Stephen Totilo writes:

In traditional RTS fashion, the player draws a box around their Lego units and clicks on places for them to move to or attack. A pull-down menu enables the player to build to build appropriately-themed Lego structures: towers and factories and the like. There was no drag-and-drop Lego construction, but manual block-building hasn’t been much of a component of any of the recent Lego games.

Our speculation back in February that the images we had then were pre-rendered cutscenes and not real game-play turns out to be true. Oh well, not surprising.

LEGO Battles will be available in June.