Lego Universe review

Kid-friendly online games are rarely as glossy as their grown-up counterparts, but Lego Universe is anything but a poor replica of an adult game. Instead, it’s a distinctive combination of action, puzzle solving and role-playing elements, with a strong emphasis on co-operative rather than competitive gaming. The plot combines Lego creativity with MMORPG tradition: the Universe has been torn apart by chaotic Maelstrom energy and it’s the adventurers’ job to help rebuild it.

Like Lego’s massively popular single-player games, Universe is designed for wide appeal. The puzzles and gameplay are beautifully balanced, as are the themes of the different game worlds. Younger kids will enjoy dressing their Lego avatar (or Minifigure in official parlance) as heroic pirates or martial artists, while teens and adults will enjoy the sly pop culture references – including Lego’s nod to the eternal pirates vs. ninjas vs. zombies debate.

The world your Minifigure roams is art in plastic brick form. Even cut-scenes, such as when you zip to another region in your rocket ship, show your character and your custom rocket exactly as you built them. Areas like the ominous Forbidden Valley, plagued by dragons and zombie samurai infested with Maelstorm energy are lovingly rendered in dark, menacing colours. Elsewhere, you’ll find lush forests and herds of wild animals waiting to be tamed.

There are three core elements to the game: adventuring, building and interaction with other players. It’s the adventure that’s the real hook here, and it’s obvious how much attention has been lavished on every aspect, from plot to puzzles and environments. There’s plenty of running, jumping and slashing at enemies, who disintegrate into piles of bricks and bonuses, but there are also tranquil secret areas, mini-games to win items or tame pets and some epic questing.

Throughout the game, you’re showered with items, rewards and Xbox-style achievements. The downside to this is that, although you can carry infinite building blocks to play with on your own in-game property, you get very limited inventory space for weapons and armour. This means you end up discarding a lot of cool-looking items because they’re just not useful enough. Secondary inventories for Lego bricks and ready-made scenery blocks suffer from the opposite problem – you end up with thousands, with few options to sort them. We still had fun constructing castles and gardens in our personal building zones, but it requires some painstaking sifting and positioning and still isn’t as much fun as real Lego bricks.

Once you’ve finished building spaceships and fighting against robots in the introductory areas, you’ll have to join one of four in-game factions, divided into construction, exploration, combat and the chaotic Paradox faction, which seeks use Maelstrom energy itself to restore the world. This being an MMO, there’s naturally some levelling-up to be done. Although you can earn health and energy upgrades by completing certain quests, there’s no traditional levelling system. Your stats are instead largely determined by your equipment. Much of the best equipment early in the game can only be bought from specialist faction vendors, where, in addition to large amounts of gold, you’ll need faction tokens to buy gear. Faction tokens can only be earned by smashing enemies. Lots of enemies.

We had to invest a couple of hours’ solid combat time to earn enough to buy Level 2 gear – there are currently only three levels of equipment available, although we expect to see more as the game expands. Acquiring faction tokens gets easier as your equipment improves enough for you to face tougher foes, who drop more tokens. However, in typical RPG fashion, better equipment costs more, too.

Fortunately, there are other incentives to keep on slashing, mostly in the form of achievements, which provide a smug sense of self-satisfaction, as well as garnering you shiny new equipment and stat bonuses. Eventually, you’ll hit a point where the equipment you get in reward for completing quests outclasses all but the most specialised of your faction’s equipment, which comes as something of a relief. It’s this combat-heavy stage that the very youngest players may need their parents’ help to get through.

Safety is paramount in any online environment aimed at children, and Lego has spared no effort in making Universe as secure as possible. All in-game chat is checked by an automatic censor, which blocks numbers as well as any words not in its extensive dictionary. While this can limit interaction and cause problems in situations where fast communication is required, it’s still an excellent safety precaution. There are also moderators online at all times and quick contact options for reporting problems.

Minors require parental approval to include people in their network of friends, and accounts can only be fully validated by checking against national passport or driving licence databases. The game is designed so that it can be played solo, except for occasionally asking for assistance from other players in the immediate area. This detracts from – but doesn’t eliminate – the guild-based play common to most MMOs, but means that your child won’t have to sign up with a group of strangers just to play certain areas.

A downside for parents who want to play alongside their kids is that you’ll need to have a separate account for each player. You can have four avatars associated with each account, but only one of them can be online at a time. We’re surprised that Lego hasn’t already released family packs.

Lego Universe isn’t perfect; there isn’t enough of it, for a start. Less than 18 hours’ play was enough to see almost every part of the game world as it currently exists. That said, there are already a couple of new areas under construction that Lego promises to reveal before the end of the year. In the mean time, there’s still plenty of fun to be had and it’s great to see a rewarding MMO with a safe environment and gameplay that both children and adults can enjoy.

Despite its flaws – painfully limited backpack space, poor building block sorting and a slightly incomplete feel to the world – we found Lego Universe genuinely compelling. It’s a beautifully crafted game, and we’re giving it four stars in the expectation that it’ll continue to grow and develop.