Everyone loves Lego, that’s a scientific fact. As a kid I adored building anything and everything with Lego and my family couldn’t get enough too. Sadly nowadays I can’t afford Lego and gaming together unless I donate my body to medical science. Well fear no more as for a decent price and a gaming console, you can create what your heart desires in Lego Worlds.

Lego Worlds is an exercise of exploration, creativity and design where if you love Lego then there is definitely something here for you. What makes Lego Worlds a compelling game at its core is a wonderful sense of freedom and craftsmanship; however there are some small factors which impose on an otherwise fantastic journey. Let’s find out more. Lego Worlds allows players to venture through a massive universe in search of new and exciting worlds, to explore, modify and customise to their own will. Players are tasked to obtain vital gold bricks which will increase the power of the space ship, allowing them to further expand the universe with bigger and more interesting worlds to discover while giving more substance to customisation.

Over the course of exploration, players will obtain an inventory of strange devices that allow the world before them to be changed in a variation of ways. You can paint, copy, destroy items and even change the terrain to your fitting. The way you change the world can be for artistic value or simply to discover more resources such as gold bricks. Meaning that the primary mechanics play beautifully to either customise your world freely or engage in the adventure at hand.

In order to collect gold bricks, players will have to accomplish various tasks dotted around each world. Usually these tasks force players to complete in fairly lacklustre objectives such as fetching components, copying existing objects, painting buildings and rescuing people by altering the terrain. There’s nothing truly engaging about these tasks and they feel highly repetitive after the first few hours. What holds up impressively well against the repetitive nature of mission objectives is the randomisation of Lego worlds. There seems to be an endless array of worlds to land on and the ever changing nature to the universe is utterly amazing.

Players will explore a diverse gathering of planets harbour a fantastic sense of complexity which can enhance the level of adventure. The layers to each world can be a little intimidating but after the first couple of hours, you'll have the natural urge to go out, interact, explore and be rewarded justly so. There's a great range of themes for worlds including, swamps, medieval kingdoms, modern cities and worlds made from candy. Truly the sense of imagination is perfect for a Lego game. This also includes a vast accumulation of different objects, interiors, buildings and even different tiles for the floor to be discovered and used.

Designing your own worlds requires of a long journey of patience as you'll need to collect 100 Gold bricks in order to unlock this option. But in all respects it's worth the wait, even if the adventure side of things just feels a little like an overly long training segment. However you can fully master in this time the means to shape existing worlds to your own bidding and learn how to create fully dynamic and interesting worlds. Yet some features of designing worlds can be a little crude with clunky controls and with some frame rate issues that can ruin the flow.

The biggest issue here however is the combat as it’s simply poorly executed and feels completely out of place. There will be times when exploring confined caves and you’re attacked by two opponents only to find out that aiming is incredibly difficult and attacks feel under powered for the most part. There’s really no rhythm or reason for death as you simply come back a split second later. It's not needed overall and feels a little crudely tacked on. It could’ve been an interesting mechanic if the worlds you designed could be have battles take place or events such as fighting dragons could be implemented.

Otherwise the choice and variation of what you can create is grand and never restricts your imagination.

While some features may impair on your ability to create worlds with confidence and the overly long journey before you can fully create your own worlds. There’s plenty to enjoy and love about Lego Worlds from the colourful aesthetics, range of design, variation of themes and the scale you can build upon. Even the narrator has his moments of pure comedy gold that brought out a smile and chuckle from me every so often. For the price of admission, Lego Worlds is an easy pick and deserves to be looked at by fans, Lego nuts and master builders of all ages.

++ Great sense of discovery and adventure
++ Freedom to build whatever your heart desires
+ Colourful, charming and wonderful to play
- Repetitive mission objectives
- Crude execution of combat
-- Some minor technical issues

An Xbox One copy of Lego Worlds was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review

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