LEGO Worlds | Xbox One

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If you think LEGO Worlds seems out of the blue, rest assured, you wouldn’t be alone in that thought. The open-universe game (stay with us here) sees you jumping from world to world in your ship to collect gold bricks and unlock even more worlds. The worlds themselves are square blocks of terrain consisting of one or two different biomes on the surface and a few cave systems thrown in underground, feeling somewhat reminiscent of Terry Pratchett's Discworld - albeit without the giant turtle.

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by James
Michael
Parry

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@James_Parry

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Developer: Traveller's Tales
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Platforms: Xbox One, PS4, Nintendo Switch, PC
Players: 1 - 2

Landing on your first world for the tutorial, a brash, over-the-top voiceover - provided by an on-form Peter Serafinowicz (Star Wars and Guardians of the Galaxy) - greets you and begins talking you through the steps that’ll get you up to speed. The tone here is a key part of what makes the game what it is, and Serafinowicz’ delivery goes a long way to creating that, as without it we imagine the game could feel quite lonely.
 
Time to address the elephant in the room. By now you’ll have noticed (if you’ve peered at the screenshots) that Worlds looks a bit like another building game with a blocky art style - Minecraft. The game seems happy with these inevitable comparisons - as, of course, the brick system itself has been around for years, long before Minecraft - though it’s selling the game short to suggest it’s derivative.
 
In fact, Worlds takes the potential of creativity to another level, perhaps surpassing even Minecraft’s well-equipped Creative mode by offering a dazzling number of different brick types. You don’t just get the classic two-by-four LEGO brick, but a mass of different shapes, colours and sizes; that’s even before you get onto all of the premade characters, structures and props, which can be collected and reproduced to allow for customisation to your heart’s content.
 
Gold bricks are unlocked by completing a few different types of straightforward missions. These will feel familiar to anyone who’s played a LEGO game before, and, as a result, can unfortunately fall into the same repetitive traps. The difference is that, once you’ve unlocked all of the different tools - including ones which let you manipulate the landscape, paint it and copy and paste your creations - you’re mostly free of limitations in how you approach them.

The downside to this freedom, and very much the other side of the double-edged sword, is that with the ability to literally delete the entire map, so too do you have the power to spoil your own fun by seriously messing up the way the various worlds are put together. This can lead to NPCs, who may live in pre-established towns or settlements or just wander, getting a bit confused as well.

With a game structured as loosely as this though, is that important? To an extent it is, in that it can make acquiring gold bricks more difficult, 10 of which you’ll need to unlock random worlds, along with 100 to create a world of your own from scratch. If you’re itching to get creating on a blank canvas sooner rather than later, then you’re confined by a more restrictive structure as a result. You could, however, simply bulldoze the tutorial level and start from scratch there (once you have the appropriate tools), which is a somewhat reasonable compromise.

LEGO Worlds is well worth a look - especially at its budget asking price - and could be a great catalyst for creativity

The game has been in early access on PC for the past couple of years, which has seen it go through countless changes alongside the development of the console versions. When you look at it from that perspective, you appreciate a little more the scale of what has been worked on here.

LEGO games come out frequently, with developer Traveller's Tales now masters of crafting enjoyable game experiences based on well-known franchises like Jurassic World and Star Wars, but Worlds is the answer to the question of what you would get if you take the big franchise names out and are left with a game based only on the building system itself.
 
The result is a game filled with potential and, at its core, an incredibly simple premise which is based on what, fundamentally, has made LEGO as popular and successful as it is in the first place. Whether that is a game to suit your taste really depends on your willingness to experiment: Would you like to build a skyscraper? Should you trap an NPC in a snake pit of your own design, for your own amusement? Do you have the precision and patience to put something together brick by brick?
 
As a starting point, the potential alone is enough to justify the game’s existence, and with the future possibility of sharing creations (models for now, but potentially entire worlds) online with other players could give rise to tons of different aspects which couldn’t come about in any other way. For the time being, LEGO Worlds is well worth a look - especially at its budget asking price - and could be a great catalyst for creativity, particularly in (but not limited to) youngsters.
 
Pros

• Creations are brick for brick as they could be in the real world
• Variety and potential on offer is mesmerising
• Controls well adapted for console…

 
Cons

• ...but could feel more precise (there’s a knack to it)
• Repetitive and basic missions
• Those who need a guiding hand need not apply

 
Score 7/10