Lego Fortnite

Review game Lego Fortnite, A fun foundation waiting to be built upon.

Nobody is surprised that Lego and Fortnite fit together satisfyingly like a pair of plastic building blocks. Fortnite’s vast and frequently breathtaking island playgrounds and the building creativity of Lego sets combine to create a survival game that is both approachable and fairly deep. Lego Fortnite simplifies some of the more laborious elements of the genre, but it also has the distinct vibe of an early access game, focusing as much on its potential for the future as on its well-oiled systems right now. Lego Fortnite has a strong base that creator Epic Games will undoubtedly expand upon in the future, but at launch, it can feel a little empty. There is fun to be had, but not a lot of it.

You’ll instantly feel at home in Fortnite’s take on the survival genre if you’ve played games like Valheim or Minecraft, which follow tried-and-true blueprints instead of creating everything from scratch. You are dropped on a procedurally generated island that is only partially contained in the greater time-loopy narrative of Fortnite. Your goal is to gather food and other resources in order to survive. Gaining more materials allows you to craft weapons and tools that you can use to fend off dangerous creatures and acquire even better materials. Later on, you can refine your weaponry and tools even further to find even rarer and deadlier materials. At this point, the track is very well-traveled, and Lego Fortnite does not try to establish any new guidelines.

Rather, it focuses on lowering friction by giving you a ton of supportive NPCs to ease the burden. While cooperative multiplayer is a feature of many survival games, cooperation is the main focus of Lego Fortnite. Up to seven other players can join you, but even if you play alone, there will be NPCs nearby to relieve a lot of your stress. This change enables Lego Fortnite to preserve the elements of survival while lightening the overall load. It also occasionally helps to reduce the grind that characterizes this kind of game, though there’s still plenty of grind to be had.

Other characters are present from the beginning of every new game, both to assist you and to provide tutorial information. Instead of erecting haphazard shelters to survive, you can build a town square that transforms your area into a village that draws in NPC Fortnite characters. After passing through ten village levels, you can lure some of the visitors to stay permanently. They will be able to enter and exit your village freely and protect it from any attackers. This effectively gives you a labor force almost right away, and you can designate NPCs to work your various crafting benches or go material gathering, giving you intermittent access to free resources. It’s like having other players at your disposal all the time to assist you, giving you some much-needed time to concentrate on more interesting tasks than waiting for food to cook at a workbench.

The Fortnite component introduces some intriguing new elements. This helps to simplify the experience of enjoying Lego Fortnite’s best feature, which is exploring the world for new resources to enhance your creations. The Fortnite side of things adds some interesting twists, such as a storm that mimics the battle royale mode’s lightning strikes and forces you to take cover, rifts that cause a small dance party on a cloud to spawn in the world that you can join with your Fortnite emotes, and llamas and supply drops that scatter random loot. Beyond that and a few identifiable skins, there’s not much to mark this as a Fortnite spin-off, but the additions still add some extra flavor to the world and create some opportunities for future development.

Combat is clumsy, similar to that of Valheim or Minecraft, with most of the action taking place while you stand and swing a sword at foes while shielding yourself from their attacks. You can dodge roll to gain a little extra agility when needed. By allowing you to recruit any friendly character to explore with you and instantly double your odds in a fight, Lego Fortnite also uses NPCs to lower the stakes a little bit. In the event that they perish, NPCs reappear shortly after, hardly damaged at all (though they will not have the items you gifted them). It’s a choice that reduces the risk and entry barrier without sacrificing the sense of adventure.

As is customary in the genre, if you do die, whatever you were carrying is dropped there, and you have to go find it. Lego Fortnite maps feel large without being enormous, so even if you’re alone, it’s usually fairly easy to venture out to any spot where you previously fell. Certain pieces of equipment, such as a very helpful glider, that increase your health and resilience or improve your mobility, remain with your character after death, meaning you won’t be totally helpless when you resurrect. All of this adds to the laid-back atmosphere that permeates Lego Fortnite; the world may present challenges, but they never get to the point where you’re dreading a corpse run or getting irritated when a fight goes wrong.

But the more time I spent traveling, the more I understood that not much has really been discovered thus far. The only real objectives are to level up the tech tree and upgrade your village. As is frequently the case, you must finish upgrading everything in one biome before having the resources necessary to survive in another. Even when you venture into their frequently deep and somewhat eerie caves, the three main biomes—Grasslands, Dry Valley (desert), and Frostlands (snowy mountains)—have their own unique features and styles, but there’s not much to find within them other than the next kind of tree to cut down or rock to mine.

One of the main ways Lego Fortnite stands out in the genre is its Lego architecture. This meant that, in terms of enjoyment, I got almost exactly what I invested. The high stakes and terrifying adventures of a game like Valheim, where new biomes become significantly more deadly and sailing the seas brings unexpected new sights and dangers, are absent from Lego Fortnite. Additionally, unlike in Grounded or Sons of the Forest, there is no plot or unsolved mystery to give you motivation to keep exploring and seeing what you might come across. This is a cool world, but it’s a pretty empty one right now.

The other main area where Lego Fortnite distinguishes itself is on the Lego side of things, which informs all the building aspects. Similar to other survival games, you can build structures like homes, defense walls, and watchtowers by continuously searching for new materials. In addition to the free-form building options, where you can assemble pieces however you please, there are pre-built Lego structures that you can build using blueprints that you will automatically unlock as you advance. These enable anyone, regardless of building experience level, to construct visually appealing and useful villages by simply plugging in the appropriate materials to create intricate, well-maintained buildings. Another way Lego Fortnite softens some of the more irritating aspects of survival games is with its blueprints, which give you the option to create beautiful homes in less time. Additionally, there is a Creative Mode that allows you to ignore the survival elements in favor of unrestricted construction. The combination of free building and blueprints creates new opportunities, enabling you to utilize impressive pre-builds as a springboard for your own ideas.

Conclusion

Thanks to its cooperative focus (either with friends or helpful NPCs) and laid-back attitude compared to other, more hardcore games in the genre, Lego Fortnite is an excellent starting point for survival games. While the recognizable monotonous grind of expanding your village and climbing the tech tree can be enjoyable, the game currently feels more like a foundation than a finished product. With all the possibilities provided by Lego’s construction elements and the concept of custom-made vehicles, what’s here shows promise, but more must be added before Lego Fortnite feels like a complete set.