Lego Islands
LEGO BUILDER’S JOURNEY captures the joy of those little plastic bricks
When I was little, I had a crate of Lego pieces. Once new sets had been built and enjoyed, they were dismantled to become more fuel for the crate, a seemingly bottomless well of colourful, constructive opportunity from which entire worlds could spill forth. Lego has been incorporated into dozens of games since the mid-1990s, but none of them bring the magic of my crate to life like Lego Builder’s Journey.
Each of the dioramas that make up Lego Builder’s Journey is shaped by a single goal – to bring your character from one side of the level to the other. There is, however, no prescribed solution to any puzzle. In true Lego style, you’re free to use the blocks provided any way you like. It’s often an iterative process, but one with no fail states or wrong answers. Your solution needn’t be elegant or efficient. If the pieces fit together, there will be some kind of way forward.
The pieces themselves handle in a way almost as satisfying as the real thing, snapping into place or rattling against each other as you comb through them. It’s an amazingly tactile experience, bolstered by the incredible detail on offer in each diorama, all of which are created entirely from actual pieces.
Even the story, a simple narrative of parental responsibility and childish imagination, speaks to what Lego has always attempted to invoke. For the parent figure, play must be pushed aside for the monotony of work, while for the child, the wonders of the natural world make way for the wonders of their imagination. A robot companion comes to life, turning the browns and greens of dioramas inspired by hiking trails and remote campsites into the vibrant primary colours of children’s TV. A healthy dose of slapstick and childish naivety ensures Lego Builder’s Journey never deviates too far from its toybox origins, but the dark, industrial nature of later levels means that its
more serious ideas land. While other Lego games lean on the bombast of massive crossovers, Light Brick Studios focuses on what it’s actually like to play with those little coloured blocks. It’s a subtle approach, but one that obfuscates the game’s limited scope, capturing everything from the imaginative freedom that Lego offers to the feeling of handling each individual brick.
STRUCTURAL DAMAGE
Across the levels that made up the original mobile version of Lego
Builder’s Journey, the game gently twists and turns, picking up ideas and dropping them again at will. Throughout the earlier stages, the sandbox style persists, with the few levels in which there’s a more defined solution often trying to highlight a specific theme. Limited perspectives lead to some issues with transparency, but the difficulty curve remains steady throughout, often relying on the complexity of the bricks you use rather than the puzzles themselves when it ramps up. When the original finale does arrive, it’s an excellent capstone to story, theme and design.
Unfortunately, later levels maintain little sense of that gentle progression. Those included in this PC version but not available in the original release introduce a new approach. Rather than use complete bricks, these puzzles allow you to stitch together fragments or duplicate the blocks you’ve already made, adding an unwelcome element of experimentation.
Within the beautiful environments and open-ended approach to puzzle solving, Lego Builder’s Journey is perhaps the most authentic, earnest Lego game there’s ever been. From the sense of freedom that a pile of bricks offers right down to the individual bricks between your fingers, it manages to recreate not just what Lego is, but what it can be. The attempt to build on its finely sculpted original outing is clumsy, sacrificing much of the open-ended approach that makes it so successful, but the way in which it captures with such care and attention something so beloved through its physicality and tactility, even in this virtual format, makes this a very special game.
It focuses on what it’s actually like to play with those coloured blocks
To put it bluntly, this game is some of the most fun you can have on PC right now. It’s a riveting, theatrical medieval warfare game that’s equally about martial arts mastery and roleplaying as a Middle Ages buffoon. Sometimes you spend 30 intense seconds expertly duelling another player with swords, other times you’re skewered by a ballista bolt while shaking your fist and declaring that you’re “power incarnate”.
At the centre of Chivalry II are 64-player team objective-based matches. These are multi-stage battles that see castles sieged with rolling towers and ladders, peasants slaughtered, and caravans ambushed. They all start roughly the same way: both teams lined up and sprinting at each other with swords, axes, polearms, maces, bows, and more. I approach these charges by smashing the ‘yell’ key to howl stupidly, throwing my shield into the mass of bodies, chucking my sword after it, and then meeting the enemy with hacks from my secondary axe. If I’m lucky, I break through the line and chase down the cowardly archers who stopped running 50 yards short of the fight.
Subsequent lives in Chivalry II’s objective maps have quieter beginnings. You spawn a short jog away from the front line, where one team is trying to accomplish a typically medieval goal (burn the tents, push the siege towers, destroy the trebuchet), while the other stands in the way. Each map tells the story of a battle between two factions, the Agathians and the Masons, a setup that could have been superfluous, but which is treated with such comedic seriousness that it feels essential. There’s even a lore codex.
I always try to win, but treating Chivalry II like an esport is like expecting WWE Hell in a Cell matches to adhere to the rules of Greco-Roman wrestling. It’s theatre. Sometimes you’ll come across two players bowing at each other, or
crouching up and down. What are they doing? It doesn’t matter. Leave them be. If I need a break from blocking, kicking, jabbing, feinting and riposting, I’ll pick up someone’s head or whatever else I can find lying around and stand around shouting.
Each map tells the story of a battle between two factions
PARRY ME
The casual atmosphere somewhat belies Chivalry II’s complex and challenging melee combat system. Its best achievement is that it is possible to fight multiple opponents and win. You could see it simply being pointless: getting hit interrupts your attacks, so how could you have a chance with multiple enemies trying to hit you? The answer is counters and ripostes, specially timed attacks which briefly block all incoming attacks. With skill, it’s possible to win a one-on-three, and it feels like being Henry Cavill’s Geralt in the scene where he gets the ‘butcher’ moniker.
Chivalry II’s 2012 predecessor was made by modders turned pro developers, and that do-it-yourself PC heritage shows here. Chivalry II has auto matchmaking if you want, but also features a server browser, with support for custom dedicated servers on the update roadmap. The essential graphics options are all there (arbitrary resolution, unlocked framerate, FOV slider, motion blur toggle), and the art is fantastic.
It can be a bit janky, though. One time I accidentally teamkilled a guy because hucking bandages into his face registered as damage instead of healing. Bug fixes are coming, but
Chivalry II will probably never be perfectly well-behaved software. (Games described as ‘polished’ tend not to be this fun, though, so maybe it’s for the best.)
New maps are also on the way, and eventually horses. Those content updates will be free. The only in-game purchase I can see is a currency that lets you unlock cosmetic items faster than you would by playing. The weapon unlocks (which have to be earned) increase your loadout options at a reasonable pace. It’s a fine way to provide milestones for newcomers, but I like playing Chivalry II because it’s fun to win fights or come up with stupid roleplaying ideas, not because I’m driven to unlock more stuff. It’s a novel idea, games that are fun regardless of how much stuff you can collect, but I think it may catch on.