Posted by Marcus Sellars follow him on Twitter
Lego has had many video game adaptations and some are among my favorite games ever like Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga. The Lego company hasn’t ventured into open world sandbox games yet, so how good was Lego Worlds on Nintendo Switch?
Lego Worlds was developed by Traveler Tales and published by Warner Bros which are both great companies in their own right. Traveler Tales is well known for creating the funny dialogue in all the Lego games and as it’s an open world sandbox game you don’t really get any of that. This was quite a disappointment to me as I feel like all Lego games should have some light hearted humor in them. The game felt quite dull after I found out there wasn’t any funny dialogue but i suddenly changed my perception when I started playing more of it. The core game-play is based around building whatever you want with whatever you want. This has always been a dream of mine since I was younger, playing with Legos your imagination goes wild and you start building with the bricks at your disposal but then you realize you are missing a key piece in your design. This is where the game comes in handy you cant miss a brick because you have a ton of bricks to build with. All being said its not the same as actually creating a Lego set but its quite cool the full world around you is Lego! Maybe that’s why they called it “Lego Worlds”.
The graphics aren’t the best in this game they feel a little rough round the edges but they aren’t bad. Sometimes when the camera goes beneath the world or gets stuck behind the object that’s when the graphics seem to look slightly degraded and the frame rate decreases. The Bricks have a glossy look to them which makes it look slightly odd to be honest but I know they wanted to mimic the actual shine of the Lego Bricks so its understandable. The game-play is fun if you get used to all he complicated menu layouts as it can be very confusing. Firstly you have to hold down X do bring up a circle of buttons to press but when you move your stick it doesn’t go the direction you are wanting. You need to compensate by slowly moving your joystick to press the correct one which can get frustrating since you need to access this menu a lot. After you press the right one you then have to find the right brick through hundreds or swap to a different weapon just to add or remove bricks. I wish they set it out like Minecraft then you could easily destroy or build with ZL and ZR. If you can get past the clunky menu layout and manage to memorize where bricks are you will find yourself building magnificent structures. However the world sizes aren’t large at all and seems small for a sandbox game. You will definitely be building across multiple worlds and saving different files because you wont be able to fit all your creative ideas into one. This is a problem I faced frequently you get to the edge of the world and you realize it doesn’t keep loading reaching the end of the world.
Audio in this game is good and I think the menu song is actually really catchy it stuck in my had the first day I played. The main voice you hear is the narrator who talks when you first start a world. In terms of replay ability it’s a sandbox game so there is endless amounts of fun and learning the weird controls and layout of menus. The game-play is fun and brought the creativity out of me. It was very enjoyable exploring a Lego world and producing my wildest creations.
In general I think it’s a good game but lacks some important key features like large worlds and refined controls. Despite some flaws the core game-play is very fun and enjoyable and it brings back so many memories of mine.
