Lego Worlds review (Early Access) Review

NEED TO KNOW

What is it? An attempt to bring the iconic Danish blocks into a virtual 3D sandbox.
Influenced by Minecraft
Reviewed on Intel Core i5-2320 CPU, 8GB RAM, AMD Radeon HD6670
Alternatively Minecraft, Terraria, Starbound, Don’t Starve
Price £11.99 / $14.99
Release TBC 2016
Publisher Warner Bros.
Developer TT Games
Link Official site
Multiplayer None currently, but planned

Alpha and Early Access reviews offer our preliminary verdicts on in-development games. We may follow up this unscored review with a final, scored review in the future. Read our full review policy for details.

It had to happen eventually. The number of times that the words ‘Minecraft’ and ‘Lego’ have appeared in the same sentence over the last decade would likely rival salt and pepper in the global psyche as Most Immediately Obvious Pairing. But while this block-based sandbox takes the familiar Danish toy and rebuilds the seeded worlds of Mojang’s much aped forerunner, there’s much it does differently. There was no cobblestone farming necessary to get me going for a start. Within minutes of playing I’d built a western saloon, ridden a polar bear across a snow-capped mountain range and discovered a race of cavemen parading around on a beach waiting for me to pilfer their minifigure forms.

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Despite being very clearly in its infancy—the full version is not expected to launch until at least 2016—Lego Worlds feels very capable when giving you excuses to get out and explore. There are constant surprises lying in wait, and each one you discover has its blueprints sucked up into the top left menu bars ready for your to rebuild anew at any time at the cost of the game’s familiar stud currency. You can still bash trees and bushes or knock apart your surroundings. There are even a few skeletons that come out at night to give you some hassle. But when it comes to getting out there and finding stuff, Lego Worlds feels much more immediate than Minecraft.

Take the game’s version of the humble bow. As you press and hold the action key to activate it you can then wave your mouse cursor over various destructible objects in the world, before releasing and seeing your minifigure avatar unleash a barrage of quick fire volleys. This is not about timing, or accuracy, but more about seeing those delicious studs erupt from stuff and then having them gravitate towards you before blinging satisfyingly into your wallet.

Likewise, you don't need to grind, nor to craft suitable saddles or whatnot to be able to leap aboard a horse. I clambered up on the first creature I found (a wolf puppy) and was zipping off to discover a new biome over the hills and far away. Pretty much everything with feet or wheels is ridable.

This push outwards, to get off your plastic rear end and explore, is ushered along by some joyous animation. Your minifigure hero, who’s also customisable with the bits and pieces you discover in the world, windmills constantly, like he simply cannot wait to be just three feet further ahead than he’s standing. The enthusiasm on display is infectious.

Sadly, the fact that you’re seeing this world from a third-person perspective is as conducive to crafting in a 3D space as having your eyes replaced with those of a dog. It’s wonky, imprecise and you’re as likely to break the thing you're building with inaccurate brick placement as you are to walk away satisfied with a job well done. Without a first person view and a helpful voxel grid to aid you, building is an exercise in extreme patience. That there are so many pre-built props for you to discover and break out as and when you feel like altering your surroundings is telling. The problem is, watching a little Lego fellow spew bricks out of a funny looking gun and into the form of a wooden cabin is nowhere near as fun nor as rewarding as laying down the brain blueprints yourself and having at it might have been.

Minecraft’s innate brilliance is in its simplicity. Anyone with half an interest can bash a tree in for the very first time and then hours later find themselves standing in the centre of a mountainside skull fort they’ve just constructed. The uniformity of the blocks is the key. With every conceivable shape and size of Lego block under the sun at hand here it’s a task to know where to start, or what you might end up with.

I have cherished memories of upending buckets of Lego bricks onto my living room carpet as a kid, then letting my brain take me in impossible directions as I’d put them all together in fantastical ways. Playing Lego Worlds feels like having that bucket tipped out, but only allowing me to interact with the resulting pile with a solitary finger.

It’s hard to recommend Lego Worlds right now as more than a curiosity for those with a predisposition for all things Danish, plastic and covered in studs. For anyone else it’ll likely pack a couple of hours of rampant exploration which peters out quickly due to the lack of meaningful stuff to do with the said bricks you accrue.

Verdict Exploration feels immediately rewarding, but fiddly building systems irk.

GALACTIC CIVILIZATIONS 3 Review

There’s often a fine line between revolution and evolution, and which side is ‘right’ varies dramatically from game to game. Sometimes we want the next best thing. Sometimes we want a thing we like, simply done better. That’s what GalCiv 3 offers—not so much picking up where the last game off as returning to its template with a stern expression, some better technology, and a few years of lessons well learned.

Stardock’s series is pretty much unique in the 4X genre—a space conquest game that sits alongside Master of Orion instead of simply in its shadow. It’s not just a game of rules and strategy, but of quirky charm—witty descriptions to take the harsh edge off the technologies, an attempt to make the aliens you encounter feel like they have personalities instead of simply being a rendered face on some stats, and enough wrapping to feel like there are could actually be people/aliens somewhere behind your comma-filled population figures.

The biggest two differences between this version and the last, aside from a graphical polish, is that GalCiv 3 now supports multiplayer and demands 64-bit. The former speaks for itself. After years when the characters themselves would occasionally mock the idea, you can now have multiple players fighting over a galaxy. The 64-bit side of things is more interesting, though for the future rather than now. Much like a Civilization game, GalCiv is intended to have a long life. For the moment, it allows for crazy things like having a map with a hundred empires on it (though good luck actually doing that, never mind playing the result). It does however mean that future expansions, and player mods, have far more room to breathe than they once did, which bodes well. From another company, it would be hard to take that on the nod. Stardock though has proven form in this regard, both in improving its good games, and fixing up the originally dreadful Elemental.

Back into space

Either way though, the core game is extremely well-made. It’s not simply a question of rules and options but the general feel that made the series what it is, the biggest being that (with a combination of tech and wrapping, much like Alpha Centauri) playing against the AI has the feel of being up against opponents rather than simply algorithms that happen to have a face on top. Where so many 4X games, particularly space ones, are almost willfully cold, there’s a warmth to GalCiv that’s key to the fun of casual to at least mid-tier play.

Like past games, it does have a few irritations that only really strike mid-way through, such as finding out what’s actually wrong with a planet that looks like it should be performing far better, and otherwise tracking down some numbers in a pinch. By the time you’ve gone from a few systems to a bursting empire, there’s enough of them splashing around to drown in. Individual sections are very well laid out, with the Tech Tree especially making it easy to see what leads to what and what the benefits are, but the lack of a good centralised in-game Civpedia type resource does make looking things up harder than it should be.

The biggest omission from the last game—for now—is that political side has been stripped down. No elections, no governments, no spying. They’re due to return in a later expansion. The sting of that is helped by a few new arrivals though, such as ideologies. Where past games had a Good/Evil system, the civilisations this time are judged as Malevolent, Pragmatic, and Beneficial, with moral decisions providing points in each that can be cashed in for special perks. These range from basics, like a free colony ship or a top-quality planet, to galaxy-affecting boosts like any race who attacks your homeworld being automatically declared war on by everyone but their outright allies, and every planet or starbase within your Influence range joining your empire. Nobody ever said you can’t be both Benevolent and bastardly sneaky at the same time! Other new additions include pirate bases that become more of a problem the longer they’re left alone, a shift to space based ship construction, and new environmental dangers to deal with while exploring the map.

GalCiv 3 is easily the best recent 4X of this scale.

GalCiv is far more focused on the strategy side of conquest than the tactics of individual ship encounters. You don’t get any direct control over your ships at all, though you can watch the very pretty laser-beams and explosions from assorted cinematic angles if you choose. Instead, ships are given classes based on their load-out. A basic hull might be a Guardian, but slap life-support on it and it becomes a Support. Its role determines what it does and who it goes after in combat. How it actually looks though is almost entirely up to you. The design panel includes a huge selection of aesthetic items that can be scaled, moved, stuck onto hardpoints and even given some basic animation, all ‘free’. Ships can also be shared, with Steam Workshop support coming.

Whether new to the series or returning though, GalCiv 3 is easily the best recent 4X of this scale— the whole galaxy as campaign and sandbox. It’s hardly the most dramatic upgrade a game has ever had, but it’s both a more than solid update in the here and now and a great base for expansions and mods for the next few years.