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Games

'Lego Worlds' Knows What It Means to Bring Imagination to Life

'Lego Worlds' is fantastic, and the new ‘Classic Space’ pack is a nostalgia rush.
All images captured by author

I just picked up Lego Worlds, mainly to try its new 'Classic Space' DLC—basically a whole bunch of fun spaceships and space-themed things to play with—and thus far, I'm very into it. It's a wildly ambitious game. If you want the "meets" it's very Minecraft, a little bit Scribblenauts, and a whole lot of Lego nostalgia, and despite some hiccups (the camera, a save bug that made me very angry) it is excellent at its purported main player experience goal: making you feel like a kid with a titanic collection of magical, animated Lego blocks.

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Here's what you should know about me and Lego: I was obsessed as a kid, so this nostalgia play is very effective on me. When I was 11, I built a room-sized recreation of Walt Disney World, complete with two monorail systems, hotels, and representations of each land in the three (at the time) theme parks in the world. I was especially into the pirate and space-themed sets, because, naturally, pirates are fun and I wanted to be an astronaut, and building intricate, interconnected worlds and then populating them with characters (every mini-figure was a person with a life, thank you very much) was primo fun for pint-sized Danielle.

I say this to tell you that, while much of Lego Worlds is excellent no matter if you've spent time scouring your playroom for the one perfect piece, or you don't know Lego from Eggo, the Classic Space DLC is more suited for oldies who played with the sets back in the 90s. I remember playing with those sets—though, to be honest, my primetime Lego days extended well beyond the classic period, and holy shit, did you know there were apparently factions among all the space folks? I made them play space-basketball together, I had no idea…

Welcome to my cool base.

Classic Space is basically an extended playset with a moon-like theme, with numerous spaceships big and small to pilot, copy, re-color, or build all over. As with the rest of the game, you have an impressive suite of tools to build, paint, re-shape or simply spawn with, to make every world to your taste. I copied dozens of blue space dudes, tiny space go-karts, and "warrior women" for my own moon party, and built a bunch of funky landing pads, but you could do… damn near anything.

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This is where that Scribblenauts fun comes in, and I love it. Every person or animal (including robots) has behavior scripts. My warrior women walked around, flexed, posed, and did hearty belly laughs. When I introduced a 1930s explorer dude to a small space capsule with a rock monster in it, he shrieked, ran away, and promptly got eaten by said monster. There's a glorious array of behavior that's as fun to mess with as the building tools are, though there clearly isn't as much customization.

You can copy structures and features, up to and including massive buildings, or build brick-by-brick. It's an absolute dream, especially if you were a Lego fan, to have an infinite array of blocks, in every color, and available in pre-arranged structures like towers or cars.

Warrior women, in spaaaaaaace!

None of it will compare to the tactile pleasure of snapping together a masterpiece, bit by tiny plastic bit, but the animation and scripting—the fact that these worlds really do come alive—makes up for much of that.

The fiddly camera and a nasty save bug (which somehow wiped a bunch of my progress after my first go-round in the tutorial worlds) keep me from going completely over the moon for the game. I will say that anything I'm willing to go through a tutorial twice for is something special.

I wish I had more time for Lego Worlds—there are so many things I'd like to build: cyberpunk cities, treehouse villages, working lunar bases staffed entirely by warrior women—but even if I never get to craft my grandest masterpieces, I'm very glad for the time I've spent in its cute, quirky, impressively detailed lands.