LEGO WORLDS
Sandbox fuelled by your imagination lacks any of its own
Traveller’s Tales has built a game about potential. This is a creative sandbox in which the tools grant you the potential to construct anything – it’s literally virtual Lego, each iconic block represented – and it’s also potentially an excellent game. But, just like your imagination and patience will likely stop you short of recreating the Sistine Chapel, it never lives up to that promise.
Lego Worlds seems like an attempt to work Lego into the Minecraft template. However, outside of procedurally generated biomes, dungeon crawling, building, and skeletons that want to murder you, there are few similarities between the two games. This isn’t a survival game, for one thing. In true Lego fashion, death here is meaningless: you’ll keep your inventory and respawn immediately, losing only a few studs (read: currency) for your terminal trouble. You’re not tasked with hunkering down for the night – you’ll instead head out hunting down collectibles.
You start the game crash-landed on a tiny island. To get your broken spaceship working again and go elsewhere you need four gold bricks. These are acquired by performing tasks around the island, each one helping to familiarise you with the game’s mechanics.
There’s the Discovery Tool, a device that allows you to click on any prefab item, be it a decorative thing such as a chair, or a minifigure, and copy it to your inventory. From there, you can spit that item out, placing them throughout your world. Want a farm? Copy some animals and then plonk them in an enclosure. It’s that simple. You also get a tool to terraform the environment, flattening it, hollowing out mountains, or building peaks up to the clouds (which have animals on them, for some reason). There’s a tool to splatter your creations with paint, and another that enables you to copy any discovered creations so you can put them somewhere else.
AROUND THE BLOCK
The building options really do allow you to make anything you want, be it an underground cave network or a flotilla of spaceships in the sky. Each of your creations must be erected one brick at a time. When colouring your masterpiece in, you can even reduce the target area down to a single brick. There are two things holding this creation suite back, however: one is the cumbersome interface, and the other is the fact you need to first collect all the bricks. To make it worse, these bricks appear at random, either when you pry open the right chest or chase down an NPC.
It’s the same for the game’s weapons and other items. There are hundreds of things you can use, including a variety of bombs, swords, guns, and
“PROGRESS WIPES, ONLINE WORLDS NOT SYNCING, HARD CRASHES – THE WORKS.”
torches, but you need to track them all down first. The method of collecting them is tedious, requiring you to repeat simple quests over and over again (or, if you want to do it the easy way, you can just open some chests and find the things you want that way).
COMPLETELY BRICKED
Boring block-seeking is not optional, either. If you want the larger worlds with the more interesting biomes, you’ll need to keep collecting gold bricks. Again, opening chests is the easiest way to find them, so Lego Worlds devolves into a game of hunting down these item boxes. They’re often in buildings or buried in caves beneath the ground, so you simply terraform your way to them and open them up before leaving and doing it all again. It helps that there are often multiple chests all spawned inside each other, allowing you to stand in the same place and keep on opening them up until they’re all gone. Did I mention Lego Worlds is a buggy mess?
In my time with this game I experience progress wipes, online worlds not syncing, hard crashes, game-breaking bugs, visual glitches – the works. In two-player mode these problems are doubled, with players being stuck in menus, disappearing entirely, and myriad other problems. If you both start launching bombs around, you’re likely to see an error screen.
It’s an imaginative concept, executed poorly. Unless you’re a Lego fan with acres of patience, stick with Minecraft, block enthusiasts.
VERDICT
From the ocean depths to its towering mountain peaks, Lego Worlds promises infinite possibilities. It’s a shame all of its potential is squandered with dull gameplay and horrible bugs. Kirk McKeand