Sank like a brick
(This
review contains spoilers!)
Lego games are always a mixed bag.
Sometimes you’ll find a great multiplayer experience that can be enjoyed with a
friend over the weekend, like last year’s Lego
Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Other times you’ll get a half-baked bug
riddled experience that won’t be fun for anyone old enough to recognize poor
game design, such as Lego Jurassic World.
Not only does today’s game fall into
the latter category, but it very well might become the new king of bad Lego
games. While most lousy entries in this franchise usually suck because of badly
designed puzzles or an overabundance of glitches, Lego Worlds one-ups all of them by being literally unfinished.
I mean it. This game being sold for
$30 on Steam as a finished product feels like an Early Access game being
released in the Alpha development phase.
Lego
Worlds’ biggest claim to fame is being completely unoriginal. Sorry, what I
meant to say was that this game borrows elements of several other popular
recent releases, such as Minecraft and
LittleBigPlanet. Unfortunately, the
final product I played felt less like the fun adventure of Minecraft and more like the game-killing tedium of No Man’s Sky.
Seriously, if someone took No Man’s Sky, slapped a brick building
feature onto it and made it even worse than it already was, Lego Worlds would be the result. It’s
boring, uninspired, unoriginal, and is a complete chore to play.
The game is a collect-a-thon of sorts,
but it does the absolute bare minimum to be considered one. All you have to do
is complete simple puzzles to get gold bricks so you can power up your ship and
fly to other worlds, where you repeat the cycle all over again.
Hm. That sounds…familiar.
But these worlds are just so
depressing to explore. I can honestly say that I’ve seen N64 maps with more
depth to them. The titular worlds in this game are no more than an 18x18 flat
area with some hills, trees and maybe a house or two to make them interesting.
There are no secrets, no bonus minikits or red bricks like in other Lego games,
nothing. Just a boring flat area and a minimap that tells you exactly where all
the gold bricks you need are.
The presentation is equally as boring
as the rest of the game. The graphics make the original Lego Indiana Jones game for the Wii look like Horizon: Zero Dawn in comparison.
The music is nothing but awful fanfare looped infinitely that is
uninteresting and excruciating to listen to. And the sound design, oh dear
sweet god, the sound design. This game has some of the worst sound effects in
any game I’ve played in recent years. You know that iconic building sound that’s
become a staple in the Lego game franchise? Imagine that sound byte being
played a thousand times layered on top of each other and with insanely high
volume compared to the rest of the sounds.
But honestly, I can deal with boring gameplay
and bad presentation. What is it about Lego
Worlds that made me really angry?
Well, like I said at the top of this
review, this game is literally unfinished. I was completely astounded at the
amount of bugs and glitches I found in the incredibly short time I played this
game, even encountering one that stopped my progress altogether.
First and foremost, multiplayer breaks
the game. Literally. While the game encourages couch-co-op, playing Lego Worlds with a partner is a literal
impossibility. I really enjoy playing Lego games with my brother, with our
playthrough of last year’s Lego Star Wars
being one of my personal favourite gaming memories of 2016. But within five
minutes of him joining in, the game essentially locked up. Respawns were
frequent as tools and items got trapped in our characters hands, and I legitimately
couldn’t progress to the next world while he was logged in. Once he quit the
game allowed me to progress for whatever reason, and I continued playing on my
own.
There’s also an online multiplayer,
but I couldn’t tell you how it is, because it requires someone on your friends
list to also own the game to be used. While I can see why the developers did
this (the target audience is definitely one that probably shouldn’t see some of
the more…interesting stuff you find on online multiplayer), imagine how cool it
would’ve been to find and download cool castles or dinosaurs or whatever that
other people have built online and drop them into your world! As far as I can
tell, this isn’t an option, but it might very well be and nobody’s uploaded
anything because the publisher didn’t advertise this game whatsoever and
everyone’s still rightfully playing Breath
of the Wild instead of this dreck.
Even without a second player causing
the game to have a hissy fit, the game’s still riddled with issues and glitches.
The camera bounces up and down and to and fro all over the place, making Lego Worlds the second game I’ve ever
reviewed on this blog to make me actually feel sick while playing it. I was so
dizzy when I stopped playing I had to close my eyes for a moment just to
readjust. Sometimes the controls just don’t work with no explanation either.
The game will require you to click on stuff multiple times before it finally
gets the message that you want to use your scanner or hop to the next world,
leading to lengthy times of you mashing every button on your controller trying
to remember which button does which.
Which brings me to my next point!
Despite shoving dozens of different tools and abilities at you in the first
fifteen minutes of game, Lego Worlds decides
that you don’t need the controls to
figure out what to do! Every once in a while a map of controls will pop up in
the bottom-right hand corner of the screen, but it vanishes just as often.
Plus, with the added trouble of the buttons often not working for whatever
reason, this just compliments the struggle of figuring out what you’re supposed
to be doing.
There’s also graphical glitches, like
characters going into their default T-poses every once in a while, plus loading
times that are insanely long when you take into account the graphics they’re
trying to load, but the absolute worst glitch I found was the one that made me
put down the controller in anger and stop playing.
So you need to find the gold bricks to
power your ship, and to do that you need to complete challenges. I needed ten
to move onto the next world, and I had nine. So I went off looking for the
tenth one.
It didn’t spawn.
For whatever reason, in all three of
the worlds I’d unlocked thus far, the NPC that had the gold brick I needed was
nowhere to be found. And this isn’t a case of “oh, maybe it was hidden and you
didn’t look hard enough” either. There was no gold brick on the minimap in any
of the three worlds, at no point earlier in the game did I get a gold brick
from anywhere but an NPC, and there’s honestly nowhere to hide in these barren,
flat and ugly worlds. My journey with Lego
Worlds ended before it even started thanks to some incompetent coder.
But maybe I should thank the bug
testers for not patching out that problem, because I don’t think I could’ve
stood another second playing this game. Like how Horizon: Zero Dawn and Breath
of the Wild have emerged as early contenders for the title of 2017’s Game
of the Year, I think it’ll need to take a monumentally bad game to tear the
Worst Game of the Year prize from Lego
Worlds’ yellow clawed hands. This game somehow managed to make it to store
shelves buggy, ugly and unfinished, and nobody should spend money on it. If you’re
looking for a Lego game to play, please, play Lego Force Awakens instead.
FINAL SCORE
1/10
Garbage
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