Capsule Review: LEGO Worlds
A building game based on LEGO and featuring powerful tools that allow you to build brick by brick, quickly plan buildings by dragging paths for the walls, copy and paste arbitrarily large or complex objects or structures, and recolor or shape the terrain as desired. It’s an impressive foundation but unfortunately it isn’t put to good use.
There are two game modes - Adventure and Sandbox. Sandbox is a freeform LEGO building simulator with unrestricted access to every brick and most built-in build plans. Adventure mode ostensibly wraps the building simulator in the context of a game, but it does so in perplexing ways. You start with only basic bricks available and are tasked with traveling between randomly-generated worlds to scan objects to make them available for building and collect “gold bricks” by completing basic quests for NPCs. Some of these require you to build something, but many do not, and they’re all shallow and repetitive. More gold bricks means you can access larger worlds, and once you’ve collected one hundred then you’ve won.
There aren’t any real characters to get attached to. There’s no reason to stick around on any individual world, so no reason to invest in building a base. Your opportunities to unlock more bricks are randomized, so there’s no way to go after anything in particular. It is technically a goal system but it’s mostly a grind through randomly-generated content that arbitrarily blocks out everything you get right away in Sandbox mode. I don’t know who would enjoy this - even kids I’d expect to have a better time with the freedom of Sandbox mode. Especially bizarre is that the game launched without Sandbox mode, and only added it in a later patch. And there are still a handful of special pieces that must be unlocked in Adventure mode before they are available in Sandbox.
All told, the audience for this game is very small. If the idea of designing and creating your LEGO masterpiece without needing to buy the physical bricks or find space to keep them is appealing, Sandbox mode is for you. Adventure mode doesn’t seem to be for anyone.
I Stopped Playing When: I played an hour of Adventure mode and was bored almost the entire time. The moment I actually enjoyed was the lone tutorial quest that tasks you with building a wall to finish a house - but since I knew I was about to leave that world and never return, I did a very sloppy job.
One Star: Not for me. While there might be someone out there who'd enjoy this game, I was actively repulsed by it or just found nothing to latch on to.