TT Games has delivered plenty of quality LEGO titles over the years, adapting its many quality licences, such as DC, Marvel, and Star Wars, while also developing its own properties, including LEGO City Undercover. The developer has never really stepped up its scale to try and rival something like Minecraft or Dragon Quest Builders, but it’s surprising that it’s taken this long for TT to put out an open world game that takes “inspiration” from the former title, in particular. Now that it’s here, how does it measure up?
Playing as an intrepid space explorer, immediately as the game begins, the explorer crashes on a small world, with only a gun that can discover items in the environment and copy them. Like all TT LEGO games, the aim is to collect Gold Bricks to progress. These are rewarded for completing simple missions from the NPCs upon each world – escort quests, fetch quests, requests to build things; the usual types of requests.
After collecting 10 Gold Bricks, the spaceship can be repaired to be able to travel to a new world. These worlds are procedurally generated, with unique types of zones and inhabitants – swamps with Goblins, lava covered volcanoes, deep oceans filled with Sharks, old west style buildings with the required cowboys. It’s fun to explore these new worlds, discovering an absolutely unbelievable amount of models. Countless hours can be spent just wandering and discovering all the game has to offer.
From this humble beginning, the little explorer gains more tools to making building more varied and more fun. The key tools consist of the previous mentioned Discovery Tool; a Paint Tool that shoots out splatters of paint, dyeing anything in the area; a Copy Tool, which can duplicate anything within a set cube for reproductions later on; a Landscaping Tool, which can heighten and lower the environment itself; and then, finally, there is the Free Build Tool. For the LEGO fans and the creators out there, this is the gem of the set, giving total freedom to build anything they can imagine with individual LEGO bricks.
Each of these tools has plenty of room for expansion, too; it’s a nice feature that they don’t come with everything unlocked. The Paint Tool unlocks new colours and effects as they’re encountered, and some paint colours can imbue the bricks with different attributes. Spray lava paint all over trees to make molten trees that burn anything they touch. The Free Build Tool initially only has a handful of the different LEGO brick shapes, while the rest have to be unlocked. At random intervals, little creatures will pop up out of the floor carrying a shape; chase it down and tackle it and that shape is added to the catalogue. There are also items and equipment to unlock, like different weapons, bombs, a grappling gun, and a camera, amongst plenty more.
The little explorer travels on and on, from one world to the next, unlocking new tools, new equipment, new bricks, and new discoveries. The more Gold Bricks, the bigger and better the worlds to explore. The problem with the game becomes that the activities on these worlds are all the same, and every type of unlock requires more grinding of the same missions, more chasing the same enemies, and more repetitive same old, same old. It wouldn’t be so bad if there were other ways to unlock things so that players could just enjoy the building, but the missions become a necessary evil to get access to more fun game elements.
