Traveler’s Tales, or TT Games as they are better known now, have been creating Lego games for many years. They brought the Lego universe to gaming life with Lego Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Batman, and more. Beyond film and book-based Lego adaptations, there is one obvious Lego game idea: one about construction. Using your imagination to build worlds and create your own adventure, like in Minecraft, is a fundamental Lego idea. With Lego Worlds, gamers can embrace their imagination with the buildings bricks rather than be stuck to an already constructed game world.
In Lego Worlds, you are able to terraform the land to your specifications, add items and objects you find along the way, and create your own adventure. This sounds great, but Lego Worlds, for all it tasks you with, is plagued with game-breaking issues.
Not even five minutes after starting Lego Worlds, the game was already breaking. Among the biggest issues is an uncontrollable camera that made it near impossible to play. Furthermore, many of the games’ tools are not always responsive. One such item is the landscape tool. This does not always allow you to move the reticule and transform the land as required.
The above-mentioned issues only scratch the surface of the game’s problems. Playing the games’ local multiplayer feature is frustrating as it struggles to keep a consistent frame-rate. As soon as another player is added, Lego Worlds becomes a barely-functioning mess.
If you can deal with these problems, you may give the game a chance. Most of Lego Worlds is about travelling to various locations and finding gold bricks to unlock new items and locations. Gold bricks are collected in multiple ways, the most common doing quests for the residents of each world you visit. These quests include painting a building or finding an item a person wants. The other way to gain gold bricks is by using all the tools at your disposal to explore the world and find the bricks hidden throughout.
On each world you have many tasks to do. Most of them are completing small objectives, but another big part of the game is using your discovery tool to scan various items in the world which you can then use to build your own world. While you can eventually get your own world to play freely on, you are not able to create as you see fit until you have explored most of the games’ pre-made worlds, meaning there’s little point to flex your creative muscles early on. All pre-made worlds are available from the start.
This makes the game feel like No Man’s Sky. You arrive on a new world and then pilfer it for all the resources you need, like gold bricks or weapons and tradeable objects, and then you leave. While each world has a unique flair – there’s a pirate world, a fantasy world, and more – each world’s basic structure feels similar. This makes world’s feel cheap as there is little reason to stick around or return, and many of the locations are quickly forgotten.
By the time you reach the third world the game already feels like it is throwing you into familiar territory, and Lego Worlds becomes a slog to get through. Many of the objects you find are similar to one another and don’t add anything meaningful, and it is rare that a world is exciting. The biggest standout was a beanstalk found in the fantasy world, but this was an exception to the rule of drab landscapes.
If you pull yourself through the tiresome world exploring bits of Lego Worlds, around ten hours long, there is a reward. The world-building part of the game is well done…when the game is not breaking on you.
Putting aside all complaints, the initial ten hour slog is worth it for the chance to play with Lego as it should be. Forget a giant intergalactic adventure or licensed property, Lego Worlds shines when it embraces the world that is now owned by Minecraft and you are set free to create your own story and world.
Lego Worlds offers a surprisingly decent building system that is easy to manage. You simply access an item known as the build tool and then line up where you want to start building. The rest is as simple as playing with actual Lego bricks as you place one block on top of the other. There is even a good variety of shapes and sizes of Lego blocks, allowing you to create some amazing structures within the world. You could even argue that it outdoes Minecraft in building simplicity.
It takes a long time to get to the good part and, aside from a rare discovery, exploring the premade worlds is not exciting, but seeing all the hard work you put into the early game really opens Lego Worlds up to the player. The creation portion of the game is what Lego Worlds should have been about all along.
If Lego Worlds was less busy and focused on setting foot on your own plot of land and creating, and did not break every five minutes, it could have been something special. As it stands, though, the slog of Lego Worlds might be too much for some, and the true freedom offered by your discoveries might not be worth some people’s time. If you have ever wanted to build and create a living, breathing Lego World, then there is something here for you, but if you just want to explore multiple bite-sized worlds, then Lego Worlds will not offer you much.
