I love Lego. There are no two ways about it. As a kid, I remember spending hours in the front room building all manner of creations before tearing them down and starting again. So when Lego Worlds was first revealed and promised to be very similar to Minecraft, I immediately thought that they were onto a winner.
The success of the Lego games on the previous gen and current gen consoles cannot be overstated. For such a simple formula, it managed to bring hours of fun as you run around various Star Wars or Indiana Jones levels, building all sorts of cool looking things and collecting characters. To put it simply, it was hours of brainless entertainment that allowed you to easily whittle away many hours on a Sunday afternoon.
Minecraft is also a global phenomenon and although I struggle to try and see the appeal of it, thousands of others are quickly sucked into the game and the premise of having an open world to let your imagination run wild is just outstanding.
The first thing to try and get across here is that Lego Worlds is trying to be an open world sandbox game that allows you to build whatever you want wherever you want, but it goes about doing this in a rather unusual way. The tutorial is basically a set of missions where you as the player must wander around collecting gold bricks to advance to the next world. Whilst doing this, you must also use your capture gun to collect blueprints of different plants, animals, buildings and costumes which are stored in a database. It is by doing this that you gather the necessary accessories to populate your world when you eventually get around to having free creative reign.
The missions are structured very similarly to the missions in other Lego games; go here and build this or go over there and lower this mountain. Although at first it is a nice idea, this quickly gets boring and becomes very time consuming. One of the ways that Lego Worlds is structured is as you progress through the various levels; your character is given more tools to manipulate the world. These include a tool to lower or raise mountains, a tool to paint houses and even a tool to place bricks. By adding this feature into the game, they seem to have taken away just how easy this kind of game should be and has made it just that little more complicated.
Each level is structured by a themed world. These include pirate, caveman theme and western themes. Each world holds new items to store as blueprints and each one has a set number of gold bricks to collect before you climb into your spaceship and dash off to the next world. I find this to be a really nice concept as it does allow the game to keep itself new and interesting and also gives the player that drive to try and collect everything that they need.
One of the things that I found stood out for me with Lego Worlds is just how polished the game actually is. For an open world sandbox game, I found that it was extremely pretty and that each world I was exploring had an aspect of life given to it. In comparison to its cousin, this is where Lego Worlds really does stand out.
It is not until after you have trawled through the many missions on different worlds does the game finally allow you to actually get stuck in and build your own Lego world. Now this does come with some pros and some cons.
One of the things I really liked about Lego Worlds is that you can build whatever you want and then populate your created world with Lego characters. You can then just sit back and watch them as they go about their business from driving cars to mowing lawns. I also had great fun putting a pirate ship in a western themed world and watching the characters interact. It is this that gives Lego Worlds the edge on most games that it tries to compete with. There is something extremely satisfying in watching your created world come to life.
But on the other side of the coin, when I say build your own world, I really do mean build your own world. When you first load up a blank map, you are confronted with a wide world with nothing on it. It is completely buck bare. It is up to you to add the oceans and the mountains and no matter how hard I looked, I could not see an option to automatically craft this element. This is where Lego Worlds becomes more complicated as the tools you use in the game provide appalling camera angles, so when you think you have built a huge mountain, you have actually just constructed a mole hill.
For a game that tries to be simple and appeal to the younger audience, I feel they have just made it all the more complicated. Yes, it is a lot of fun and yes, it really does pass the time, but for those that are fans of games such as Minecraft, they are going to miss the easy access that it offers.
However, I stress the point that Lego Worlds is not a game that is to be shrugged off. What it offers is an outstanding alternative to its closest rival and where it lacks simplicity, it makes up for in other aspects.
For the price this game is currently retailed at on the market, it is surely worth a look at, but you must also remember that the game is marketed for kids and not for adults. So my advice is to play it with their target audience and you won’t be disappointed.
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