When Lego Worlds was first announced, the game came across as Minecraft with Lego bricks. From the early gameplay footage, I thought it would be all about crafting houses and other structures but instead of looking like giant cubes, the world looks like my childhood bedroom filled with Lego constructs. Lego Worlds is very different though. The game has more structure and it revolves around using tools to help characters on various planets. You should think of Lego Worlds as a hybrid of Minecraft, Astroneer and a role-playing game.
The first hour of the game acts like an extended tutorial. You repair your ship and fly from one planet to the next collecting golden bricks. The golden bricks unlock new planets and give you additional options. For example, if you wish to explore an absolutely gargantuan world, you’ll need to collect 100 golden bricks. This involves talking to countless computer-controlled characters and either rescuing them by reshaping the terrain, or painting their houses. The tasks get more complex as you progress, but there’s enough variety that you’ll never get bored. Plus, the experience is necessary to get better at building. Practice makes perfect, right?
Lego Worlds features an incredible amount of customizability from the way you look to the land you build on. The more you play the game, the more characters and accessories you unlock. Aside from paint tools and landscaping devices, Lego Worlds requires you to uncover “Discoveries”. Discoveries are specific objects in the world which can be scanned and built. In order to increase the structures you can create, you have to constantly scan everything around you.
Aside from that, Lego Worlds features a clone tool. Let’s say that you want to create an armada of pirate ships. Well, scan one ship and clone it as many times as you want. Actually…that’s not exactly true because many of the maps are small so you’ll probably run out of space before you can accomplish that. However, the end-game worlds are massive so you can do whatever you want there. You can explore larger maps by using helicopters, dragons, motorcycles and even gorillas.
In my opinion, Lego Worlds is more about exploration than anything else. The thrill you get from discovering secrets around the landscape is addictive. It’s a polished experience which looks great on Xbox One. My only complaint from a technical standpoint would be that it runs at 30 FPS on the console and sometimes the controls—especially when building—feel clunky and odd. Bumping up the frame rate would’ve elevate the experience by reducing input lag.
Summary
Lego Worlds is a great game and has grown considerably since it was first revealed. If you love titles like Astroneer, be sure to pick this one up. When I first started playing Lego Worlds, I thought I would get bored in a couple of minutes to an hour. It’s basically Minecraft, right? Thankfully, it’s so good and exudes charm. I haven’t explored everything this game has to offer because it has so many layers. I can see Lego Worlds becoming as popular as Minecraft if the developers decide to go a route similar to Project Spark.
Asher is a games journalist, former News Writer (Gaming) at Windows Central. They contributed 1110 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: wrote over 1,100 ICXM pieces on Xbox news, hardware reviews, and platform commentary before joining Future plc’s Windows Central in 2017.