I do love me a good LEGO. Except for stepping on a loose one in the middle of the night. So you better believe this past week’s official launch of the open world building game LEGO Worlds was on my radar. In honor of perhaps the most Lego game in all of video games, we’re going to set a world record for use of the word LEGO in a review. Let’s LE GO!
LEGO WORLDS
Developer: Tt Games
Publisher: WB Interactive
Platform: Xbox One (Also available PS4, PC)
MSRP: $29.99
When it launched in early access for PC in 2015, LEGO Worlds proved itself more than a mere answer to Minecraft, you know that posh game built on the very idea of LEGO. The free-form liberty and imagination unleashed by early access players in this LEGO game grew its LEGO potential LEexponentially. Now that LEGO Worlds has officially launched, the game has wrangled in its wild west sandbox just a LEGO skosh in favor of an early teaching experience before graduating gamers to master builder.
Instead of simply tossing you in a massive open LEGO space world with thousands of LEGO bricks to confuse you, LEGO Worlds opens with a bit of story as you’ll step into the interchangeable shoes of a LEGO astronaut whose LEGO ship crashes on a small tropical LEGO island planet. It’s here where you’ll get the hang of the game’s core mechanics. Using the LEGO discovery gun, you’ll be able to catalog LEGO plants, LEGO animals, LEGO buildings, and more for later LEGO use in LEGO building just about anything your mind can come up with. As you solve some heavily guided puzzles, you’ll earn the coveted gold bricks that fix your ship in order for you to travel the cosmos to other LEGO planets.
Every planet you’ll land on has mini quests and secrets that will unlock LEGO gold bricks. From terraforming a planet to free one person trapped in a LEGO hole or simply shooting pigs out of your LEGO gun to keep a princess from feeling lonely; these quests you’ll unlock, while juvenile in most parts, are quite a variety. It builds an excitement when landing on a new planet. You just don’t know what’s waiting for you; cavemen, pirates, goblins, red squirrels. With thousands of characters, models, and basic bricks; there’s no visible end to the game’s procedurally generated goodness.
The game is incredibly huge. I couldn’t see an end to the number of random planets you’ll be able to LEGO land on. Worlds combines the gameplay of the licensed action platformers such as LEGO Batman with the interchangeable elements of toy-to-life game Dimensions. You can work with a friend in online or split screen gameplay to build even larger worlds. Should your friends be total LEGO D-bags, Worlds also has a feature that figuratively puts your created world in the mirror dimension from Doctor Strange. By changing a particular option in the settings; once the session is finished your world can be reset back to the way it was before you opened to all the damage your former friends unleashed.
There’s a fun in LEGO Worlds that you can’t find in any other game. Where else can you spawn 25 red gorillas to fight a blue flying dragon? I call it LEGO UFC FIGHT NIGHT. Build a castle brick by brick or even Ferris Bueller’s house. It’s all doable in this game.
As fantastic as LEGO Worlds is, it still has some LEGO prevalent problems. The story is a little more bare-bones than was anticipated. You are a generic LEGO astronaut whom you get to shape to your heart’s desire, but after about 12hrs with the game, I still have no clue what the initial destination was or even if our brave explorer had an endgame. While your character is customizable a million different ways, it’s hard to connect with if you want to be invested in any kind of narrative. It puts LEGO Worlds at the level of intelligent junk food; an experience you can spend a lot of time just roaming and building without a real purpose. That’s due to the sheer level of creativity possible in the game, which in a word is astounding.
Mechanically LEGO Worlds is sound, though some of the planets with large numbers of figures or animals cause some frame rate dips. This could be an issue exclusive to the Xbox One version as I never came across it in the early PC builds. Though when it got to a point of bothering me, I simply went to another planet and everything was fine.
LEGO Worlds is very much dating the LEGO bad boy/girl. It’s LEGO fun, LEGO unpredictable, even a little LEGO dangerous but not someone you’d LEGO marry to raise LEGO kids with or have a joint LEGO bank account. While it lacks an engaging story, the sheer amount of fun you’ll have is worth checking out the game for as its price is only $29.99 MSRP.
8.0/10 – While LEGO Worlds has some superficial flaws, it is however, all the virtual fun of LEGO without the real life pain of stepping on LEGOs.
