Since I've played a few of the LEGO games by TT Games before (in particular LEGO Star Wars, LEGO Batman, and LEGO Indiana Jones 2), I've decided to give this a try. Here are some of my initial impressions:
- The camera works well enough in most places, although when you enter small buildings and corridors it becomes hard to remain aware of your entire surroundings.
- The procedural world generation works, and the world looks great. There is a lot of biome variety, and it's a lot of fun just traveling around the landscape. Despite the "early access" status of the game, it all ran without any major problems - I only experienced a slowdown when I attempted to construct a castle on a cloud. Even then, I was able to break off the process without any problem.
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| Building a house on a cloud worked, though. |
- There need to be more characters with special abilities. The warlock is impressive with his fireball. The cowboy, cowgirl, and the outlaw can summon their horses with a whistle, but you can summon creatures anyway once you have ridden them once and purchased them. These are the only special abilities I discovered.
- Mounts are more varied, although most of them fall into the "move over land quickly" category. The exception are the giant eagle (flying!) and the dragon (flying and fire breathing!). Also, there needs to be an aquatic mount.
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| Still a better dragon flight simulator than Skyrim: Dragonborn. |
- Vehicles are more interesting still, since they cover a wider range of territories and some have neat special abilities, like the digger and the steamroller (building roads!).
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| Building a road for some skeletons, not that they will thank you for it. |
- Combat remains the weak point of the game, as it has been the case in most LEGO video games - in melee, it's basically just button mashing. Items like the rifle make it more interesting, but it is difficult to deal with enemies that sneak up from behind - I suppose that will work better in multiplayer, as players can cover each other.
- There need to be more hostile creatures other than skeletons (though their scream is a nice touch). Mummies and zombies just wage at you, and even the dragon just walks around unless you attack it first.
- As of yet, there seems to be little point in building anything other than to change the scenery. Which will be the point for many players, but I am not one of them. Granted, at least with multiplayer you can show off the scenery to other players, but it would be nice if created buildings and objects could do more than just sit around and look pretty.
- Some kind of objects that work under a primitive "physics engine" would be neat, too - balls that roll down hills and the like. So far, all the objects you create just stick to the surrounding landscape.
- Non-player characters and creatures could use some more interesting behavior patterns. So far, all they do is wander around aimlessly, wave, attack, or flee from anything scary (either the player or the skeletons). If they did more to interact with their surroundings, then I would be more interested in building scenery for them.
Still, I think this game is off to a good start, and if they expand on it, the game has the potential to become something truly great. And it could become glorious if the developers implemented one thing:
Full mod support.
Think about it - this game could become the ultimate sandbox, builting both fascinating landscapes and lots of different gaming approaches. Without mod support, this game will be a neat experiment. With mod support, this could easily surpass the legend of Minecraft.
Here are some possible ideas for what kinds of mods could be interesting:
- LEGO Team Fortress
- LEGO Grand Theft Auto
- LEGO: The RPG
- LEGO Sims
- LEGO Populous
- LEGO Zombie Apocalypse
- LEGO XCOM
- LEGO Goat Simulator
