‘Lego Worlds’ Doesn’t Quite Click Like the Bricks Themselves

It's not a click, is it? It's barely a sound at all, really—more a feeling, a unique sensation at the tips of thumb and finger. That moment when Lego pieces come together just so, just right—satisfying enough that you can sit there for a whole afternoon and build an as-you-go-along abomination of a condo, tree house or a luxury yacht, just to get that fix of brick against brick. So calming, so pure. And precisely what Lego Worlds is lacking.

Traveller's Tales' creative sandbox properly comes out for consoles and PC in early March, after two years of early access availability through Steam. In that time it's undergone several refinements—from the addition of a first-person camera perspective, a Lego series first, to the inclusion of, after player requests, more dinosaurs. It's proven popular. Just not quite as popular as that other game that's a lot like it, that I probably shouldn't mention.

Unlike the British developer's many previous Lego titles, Worlds carries no attractive-to-kids (and, come Dimensions' dalliance with Back to the Future and Gremlins, adults alike) license/s, nor does it feature a linear campaign, or any battle arenas, or much in the way of multi-ability puzzles. Rather, it's something of a return to one of the earliest Lego titles, the Mindscape-made Lego Island of 1997. That was a mostly objective-free build-'em-up, which left the player free to create as they saw fit, only activating "missions" at select points. Worlds is, effectively, the same thing: just bigger, shinier, and full of wonderful online sharing possibilities.

It doesn't have that snug thud though, that dull snap. You can build up and break down, shape the world of Worlds however you like, once you collect the tools to do so. But it doesn't once, in around an hour of preview play, feel satisfying. And isn't that why we build? The end results are nice, sure, but it's the process, that physical manipulation, the pulling together of totally disparate parts to produce a dinosaur quite unlike anything John Hammond would allow in his park, or a racing car with eight wheels, three of which are square, because where we're going we don't need roads.

Unless you really want them, of course, because building them is simple enough. By playing through three, Peter Serafinowicz-narrated tutorial worlds you gain the power—through the acquisition of three primary Portal Gun-like devices—to flatten the landscape and coat it with tarmac, or at least what looks like it. Or grass. Or retina-scarringly bright yellow paint. Or slapstick-style butt-burning lava. Definitely slapstick-style butt-burning lava. (Yes, in time you, too, can create your own Mordor.)

One device scans and clones assets, meaning you can scan a chicken and then fire an infinite number of feathery copies at unbothered NPC pirates. One paints, in more of a Photoshop style than Splatoon-like splatter. The third carves great holes into the ground or produces impossibly steep-sided hills—and is also essential for freeing cavemen from dinosaur ribcage prisons, as it happens. These are the basics, but each bit of kit has several layers to it, sub-menus to dip into to adjust inputs and outputs, allowing for visual refinements. There's a lot to play with, straight away, albeit not so much space to do it in.

These first worlds—small sandboxes, generated anew each time, designed to familiarize players with controls that can be pretty finicky—introduce you, too, to the gold bricks you need to make headway. Get a few and you can fly to the next world in your nifty little spacecraft; discover more and progress deeper still, to wider and wilder environments full of characters, creatures and vehicles. Gather 100 of them and you'll earn the title of "master builder" which, let's face it, so few of us are when it comes to Lego IRL.

That's the "end game" of Worlds—become a master builder. At that point, you can do more than just shape the environments the game generates for you—you can build your own from scratch. Which presents you with infinite playability, I suppose, editing builds of your own direction on a single-brick level, creating whatever your heart desires, so long as you've the patience to pull it off.

This makes Worlds an ideal destination for wannabe master builders without the finances to source all the pieces they need for radical, innovative physical projects—which, given Lego's usual RRPs, is pretty much all the money you'll make in your life. Unlike those Batman-starring and Boba Fett-featuring romps, this is Lego as you knew it to be at day one, "classic" set ground zero. You position this part onto that one, and then this, and turn that, and there you go: it's a toaster. (Or possibly a cat, TBH it's hard to tell, as that could be a tail or a cord.) Only with far greater potential for smugness and/or embarrassment, as you'll be able to show off enviously amazing and barely decipherable designs alike to other Worlds users.

But without the firm yet yielding bite of real bricks, the popping open of those numbered bags and the potential for losing essential pieces under the dresser, I personally don't feel a fantastic desire to build simply for building's sake, in a video game. Going through the tutorials, I'm never truly hooked, never compelled to really do more than what's being immediately asked of me. And when I show Worlds to my kids, who love Lego, their first question is: "Is that a new Minecraft?" (Sorry, they said it, not me.) They see the style, the squareness, before they see the branding. When I tell them it's Lego, actual Lego, like the stuff that forever covers our dinner table, they ask: "Lego in Minecraft?"

Which is as good an indication as any that a rival sandbox hasn't simply stolen a march on its inspiration's (re)entry into virtual construction, but is a year's worth of marathons ahead where it matters. Recognition. Identity. Popularity. These are problems that Lego doesn't have in the toy store, but problems that Worlds will have to stand up to, and overcome, to really impress beyond an already brand-loyal audience of block lovers. It could be that it just doesn't click.

'Lego Worlds' is released for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC on March 10th, with a Switch version due later in 2017.

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