English
Gamereactor
previews
Lego Worlds

Lego Worlds Hands-on Impressions

TT Games' blocky sandbox has spent some time in Early Access on Steam, and we got our hands on the final build ready to hit PC and consoles imminently.

Subscribe to our newsletter here!

* Required field
HQ
HQ

Fans of Lego Worlds will have no doubt played the game already on Steam Early Access, where it has been since June 2015, but for those who aren't aware, Lego Worlds aims to take the Lego style of gameplay and merge it with a sandbox game, with big open worlds and more creative options. After this lengthy period of time in Early Access, the game is finally ready to hit PC, PS4, and Xbox One on March 7, with a Nintendo Switch version coming later, and we took the chance to try the game out on PS4 at a London location this week.

Before we got set free in the colourful Lego world, we got a 20 minute introduction by Chris Rose, Associate Producer at TT Games, and he told us all the ins and outs of the game. He started, however, with a key point he wanted to get across, and that's what Lego Worlds is about. Allegedly players have been asking what the point of Lego Worlds is, presumably because it may seem, to the unacquainted eye, that it's a sandbox game, much like Minecraft. The answer comes in the form of questing: "this is our answer, this is the point of Lego Worlds, the idea that you're on this adventure to become a Master Builder," Rose explained.

The level he showed us was the same as we got to play ourselves. Basically, you start as an astronaut outside of your ship, which promptly gets battered by a series of meteors, leaving you wondering what to do. You then enter a customisation option where you can personalise the appearance of your spaceman (the options are limited at first), before skydiving into the first world: a pirate island.

This is an ad:
Lego Worlds

In this first world your ship is busted and need three golden bricks to operate again, and these are scattered around the small island. Soon after you come to this realisation, another comet drops from the sky, delivering to you a Discovery tool, and this is the most important tool in the game. This allows you to identify items in the world, from badgers to bushes, which then allows you to reproduce them for a one-time fee of studs you collect in the worlds.

As you progress, unlocking more bricks to travel to different locations, more and more tools are revealed to you, all of which are accessed via a radial menu by holding triangle (on PS4). These include the Copy tool; the Paint tool; the Landscape tool; and a few more. When each of these are discovered, a short video tutorial is shown, and then to get gold bricks to advance you'll need to use them to complete tasks, so they're introduced in a gentle, but not too boring way - suitable for all ages.

We got to see a couple of levels after the first one, and these included an island sprinkled with volcanoes, bones, and cavemen and women. There was also a candy-themed island with houses and workmen (for some reason), and a desert island filled with monkeys, so we can presume this level of creativity and randomness will persist into the full game.

This is an ad:
Lego WorldsLego Worlds

We found it pretty simple to grasp what was going on for the first few worlds. You land, need to find a certain amount of bricks to progress, and rinse and repeat, however, past the third world things seemed to get pretty unclear. We got ten gold bricks, but the next world needed 25 to unlock, we then clicked on a button prompt (unlocked by 10 gold bricks) which prompted us to unlock a random world, this being the one populated by monkeys. In this world there didn't seem to be anything of use, however, and we didn't have enough time to figure out where we'd go from there, especially since we'd unlocked all the tools by that point.

Going back to how these tools feel to use, it can be a tad fiddly to operate the radial menu, and a quick swap option might have been a bit more comfortable, but overall it's pretty easy to use. With all tools it's pretty much a case of pointing at what you want to interact with and doing so. Even when you enter construction mode and start fiddling around with altering the environment or building structures, this is easy enough to use as well.

When you're not using tools, it's also pretty smooth in terms of controls, especially for those who have played Lego games in the past. X/A is your jump, square/X is your attack, and so forth. You can also climb things now, which is as easy as jumping onto something, and TT Games has also introduced a first person view. "That's actually come as a direct result of community requests," Rose explained. "We've never done a first person camera before but during Early Access it was one of the most commonly demanded features, so we said 'okay, let's do a first person camera'. So that was well-received."

Rose also introduced what TT Games calls the Brick Built Showcase. "So we have these models [...] which lets you download these models," he said, scrolling through a selection of designs on-screen, including a house. "These are all on our server system, so basically the idea is that we'll refresh these every few days, and then the idea down the line is that we actually want players to make their own models." In the same breath he also explained that some real life Lego sets have a code you can enter in-game to get the corresponding model in the virtual world, and these two features should help keep the game's items and creativity fresh, should it continue to be expanded.

In terms of what's there right now, though, the content is pretty extensive and varied already. When using the Constructor tool, there's a whole host of bricks to choose from, and these are unlocked by discovering little creatures carrying them throughout the game, and no doubt there's plenty there to keep players entertained. The discovery tool also has a lot of content, as shown off by Rose, including many characters, animals, and structures, so we were left impressed by the sheer amount of stuff in there.

Lego Worlds

The visuals are the highlight of the game for us though. As soon as we dropped into the first island we noticed just how polished everything was. Just as in The Lego Movie, literally everything is made out of Lego, including speech bubbles, and what's more is that they even have the appearance of plastic, including the texture and the shine. This is sure to please Lego fans like ourselves, especially since any changes to the world also retain this Lego appearance i.e. craters, landscaping, etc.

At the beginning of the whole event Chris Rose told us that this was the final build for the game that we were seeing, "the release version," the one that would be unleashed into the world on March 7, which was all well and good, but it made the massive bug we encountered a little worrying. When in the world with the monkeys later on into our session, we noticed that golden beams of light that would normally indicate gold brick locations were just pointed at random places, and once we explored a bit more we glitched and fell through the floor, resulting in a blank screen and an error message on the PS4 before the game shut down. The rest of the game ran smoothly, but this was a pretty major bug and we hope that this isn't going to be a regular thing in the full release, but perhaps there's already a patch in the works to sure things up.

Aside from that, we really enjoyed what we saw, and we're pretty confident fans of not only the Lego video games but also Lego in general will appreciate the attention to detail, the creative variety, and visual design of the whole game. We're interested to see how clear your objectives become after the short time we spent with it, and where you can go and how the game proceeds, but for now we like what we see. We went in wondering if this was just Lego Minecraft, and we can assuredly say that, with it's own character and personality, it's not that at all.

Lego Worlds
HQ

Related texts

0
Lego WorldsScore

Lego Worlds

REVIEW. Written by Graham Bellars

"It seems blindingly obvious to combine the sandbox genre with the world of Lego, when you stop to think about it."



Loading next content