[REVIEW] Lego Worlds (Switch)

Lego Worlds
Played on: Switch
Genre: Sandbox adventure
Developer: Traveller's Tales
Publisher: Warner Bros.

Ah, Lego. One of the absolute joys of my childhood, unfortunately, hasn't really managed to impress me in the realm of video games, aside from the underrated former Wii U exclusive Lego City Undercover. Lego Worlds, however, had my attention. I mean, we live in a world where Lego-inspired Minecraft is one of gaming's biggest franchises, so taking the Danish toy and building a compelling open-ended survival game around it should be fine and easy, right?

Well, with the caveat that game design isn't ever really easy, I still mantain Lego Worlds should have hit it out of the park. The idea is super neat: you pilot your spaceship through procedural worlds, solving quests and unlocking different pieces, objects, characters and buildings for use on a big sandbox-style mode. Basically, it mimics how we all played Lego in real life, except we get to earn the pieces through gameplay instead of badgering our moms to open their wallets and go to the closest toy store with us.

Of course, having a good idea is only part of the process; you have to actually execute it to earn your payday. And that's where Lego Worlds, sadly, begins to unravel. The procedural worlds are fun at first glance, but end up being a series of empty, boring wastelands filled with meaningless fetch quests. You're never really compelled to immerse yourself on each planet, as the characters you encounter there are mindless drones who keep repeating requests with no rhyme or reason.

Worse still, there is virtually no power curve to be seen. Almost from the get-go, you can solve a puzzle that requires you to, say, climb a mountain by simply opening a menu and making a helicopter. No effort necessary to earn anything, and as a result no truly compelling gameplay hook to latch onto.

The sandbox mode, then, could be the game's one saving grace... except for how annoying it is to make the clunky interface do anything you want. This is obviously a game much better suited to mouse and keyboard, as doing what Lego Worlds asks of you with a controller is a borderline masochistic ordeal.

Finally, there's the coup the grace: the game runs terribly on Switch. The frame rate is sketchy, draw distance is laughable, optimization is virtually nonexistant. Characters will walk on air, hang onto nothing while suspended, get trapped nowhere specifically, all of this with floaty physics and controls which are extremely erratic.

TL;DR:

Lego Worlds is a great idea. No, really, coming from a former Lego kid, it's honestly one of the coolest ideas for a video game I've seen in recent years. The execution, however, makes it all come apart, with terrible controls, mindless gameplay loops and truly putrid optimization. The worst part is that the sheer potential on display makes it all the more frustrating to behold just how much of a hot mess the end result turned out to be.