Games Xtreme takes a peek at Lego Worlds on the Xbox One, brick by brick.
Thanks to Xbox for the code!
Lego, my Spaceship!
I love the Lego games, and Lego, I always have and I really think I always will. There's just something totally awesome about being able to mess around in a veritable sandbox of colourful bricks, playful puzzles and pure childish glee. From Lego Star Wars, to the DC and Marvel Lego games, there's a whole universe of Lego related video game entertainment out there.
But what if you wanted to build your own constructions out of virtual bricks?
What if you took the idea of Minecraft and mushed it together with Lego?
You'd get Lego Worlds, a great, fun sandbox game that lets you manipulate Lego virtually in a way you've never been able to do in a game before. It's only slightly let down by a clunky combat system, some pretty tough enemy scaling (zombie rescue events) and a wonky camera. If you can ignore those, or just work around them, what you get is a near-infinite number of procedurally generated Lego Worlds to play in and a ton of stuff to do, collect, see, build and more.
Space-Crash!!!
Lego Worlds has kind-of a story, it's simple stuff, doesn't get in the way and lets you concentrate on learning the ropes of the game. You crash on a planet, you need to repair your spaceship and then become a Master Builder. That's it, that's all you need to know - why are you still reading, get out there and start building!
Actually, there's a bit of gear-gating in Lego Worlds and you can't get very far without gold bricks. They're a staple of the series and they're even more prevalent in this game than the others. They're your lil' ships' fuel and serve to upgrade the vessel so that it can reach bigger and better places/worlds, they're also your XP bar and level you up each time you collect x-number of them from across the Lego Multiverse. Each milestone unlocks something for your ship, be it a new set of bigger worlds to explore, to a jet pack and other goodies like the grapple gun.
Lots of Planets have a North, and bricks.
Every world you go to is procedurally generated. The terrain, the underground, underwater, places to explore in the sky on clouds - you name it and you can probably get there. It's also all made up of Lego, every single bit of Lego Worlds is made up of virtual Lego bricks and studs to keep you completely immersed in the Lego atmosphere. There's no half-Lego measures here, this is the full Brick Monty. Every world also has a ton of things to unlock, by means of your Discovery Tool you'll be able to add to an ever-growing, but not easily managed, collection of characters, buildings, brick types, vehicles, monsters and everything in-between. Pay the price in studs and you can summon all the things you unlocked into the world.
Want to fire penguins at zombies Sure you can!
As long as you've collected and unlocked it, it's there for you to play with!
You'll be able to do a bunch of quests. A lot of these use the build tools too, so they're a great way to learn how to manipulate the Lego Worlds to your advantage. Many quests unlock new bits, new bricks and gold bricks, so you should try and do as many as you can to level up, gaining access to new things and a sense of accomplishment.
You'll be tasked with rebuilding someone's home, or building a specific type of building. Chances are you might not have the plan, but you can soon dig it up with your terrain tools and eventually you'll get what you're looking for. It might be a little frustrating at first, but after 30-40m of play you'll likely work out what you need to do and be able to progress.
If a witch wants you to paint her home, and it looks like a skull, painting it pink won't help. So you need white.
It's that simple.
Terrain Again
There's loads of biomes to explore in Lego Worlds, some of them appear on the bigger worlds, so you can explore from one place to another and find yourself in a new biome. Those that have water will allow you to dive beneath the waves and usually come packed with various vehicles to allow underwater exploration.
Some quests might require a new world to explore that contains the thing the other person's looking for. Experimentation is the key!
So is manipulation, of the terrain. Lego Worlds has some amazing build tools in the game, including the terrain tool which allows you to reshape vast areas to your heart's content. Raise/lower, add, remove, flatten and numerous other tweaks are possible with this versatile and powerful toolkit. The camera can be a bit fiddly to get used to, but once you do, you're able to change the ground and make sweeping alterations. Don't like that mountain, well, flatten will help there.
There's also a brick by brick build mode that lets you assemble Lego constructions with painstaking detail - again, you may have some issues with the camera here.
Lego Extravaganza
It is a great looking game, runs nicely on the Xbox One and has a lot of fun packaged away in the Lego Sandbox. Having the worlds completely made up out of Lego lets you mess with them in ways that the other Lego games simply can't allow.
Lego Together
There is a 2 player online co-op mode to the game that lets a friend join you, become your helper and allows you both to explore what the game has on offer.
There's also 2 player couch co-op.
Brick Justice
The game does Lego justice, but Traveller's Tales are really good at this so it shouldn't come as a shock to any fan of their work. It's a fun game, not one that taxes the brain by any means, but it's a great game to just kick back and get your brick build on.
