Minecraft and LEGO: the crossover we always needed but never expected. Then Fortnite swooped in with Epic Games’ bank account and said to Mojang, “Hold my beer.”
Kicking off the start of the latest season, Fortnite has added three new modes of gameplay to their hub. Now, players aren’t just subject to Battle Royal, Save The World, or other fan-made modes that exist (shout-out to Octo Game, the best Squid Game knock-off). New to the game are Fortnite Festival (essentially Rock Band), Fortnite Racing (with cars pulled straight out of Rocket League), and the most-popular LEGO Fortnite.
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LEGO Fortnite has DOMINATED Epic’s servers, hitting close to two and a half million concurrent players earlier this month. To give you some perspective, the second-highest player count was the infamous Battle Royale mode, which at its peak only saw 865k players.
Clearly, this new game mode is a hit, but does it truly live up to the hype? Lucky for you, I volunteered as tribute and spent countless of my real-life hours immersed in a pixelated brick world to answer this very question.
What is LEGO Fornite?
LEGO Fortnite is a new game mode introduced in Season 5 of Fortnite. It is an official game mode in collaboration with LEGO, with players earning experience points that contribute to their Battle Pass. However, instead of dropping into Tomato Town with your homies, you’ll be gathering, hunting, and crafting your way to success.
While I’m certainly not the first to liken it to the other popular game, Minecraft, the likeness is obvious.
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Similar to Minecraft, the objectives of the game are not clear from the outset. Your LEGO-fied Fortnite character is dropped into a strange and sprawling expanse to find their way. Over time the objectives will make themselves known, but for the most part it’s a survival sandbox with adorable LEGO sheep.
OK, But Seriously… What’s The Goal Here?
When I first dived into the new mode, I had to regularly ask my friends what the next objective was. Again, when I led the Quest Daily team on a mission to experience LEGO Fortnite, they asked me the same thing.
In an age where we are so used to being taken by the hand and led through a video game’s tutorial, it’s rather strange and refreshing to just be dropped into a vast expanse with little guidance. Having said that, players do have the option of talking to their resident helper and first NPC who spawns alongside them. This character can give them hints and directions on where they need to go and what they need to do next.
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Like Minecraft, players can launch either a Creative or Survival world. In Survival, players can encounter an abundance of enemies in their adventures. Bandits, skeletons, aggressive rolling crabs — enemy variety is certainly there.
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Enemy type and difficulty increase from area to area, and upgrading tools and weapons will be necessary to take on new biomes.
Enemies will also drop items and resources imperative to build new equipment.
Ultimately, the goal is to upgrade your village to its maximum level, recruit all NPCs to live with you, and build the brick-tastic town of your dreams.
Start Of Something Great
There are a few quality-of-life functions that were seriously overlooked in the development. It’s almost as if this game is in early access — not that that’s a bad thing.
The game overall is strong, but it lacks the polish of most modern Minecraft-esque experiences.
I’d love to see some quality of life improvements, starting with the organisation of chests and storage. The usual left-click function to split a pile of items in half is absent, and instead players have to manually split the pile with a bar slider. Additionally, depositing a stack of items into a chest does not automatically pile on top of a stack of the same items already in the chest.
See below for an example.
Building houses and structures can also be fiddly. Unless you’re in creative mode, you’ll need to build external scaffolding to place bricks that cannot be reached from the ground. The actual placing of the bricks is tedious as well, as they don’t always snap into place when you think your cursor is in the correct spot.
All of that said, these gripes are minor. They’re more of a wishlist and would go a long way to improving the gameplay of LEGO Fortnite. Hello, Epic Games! Are you listening?
Graphics
Stunning.
The mix of LEGO characters with a more realistic-but-a-tiny-bit-Ghibli aesthetic of the world might seem to clash at first. While a rather strange choice, it actually works well. One of my personal issues with Minecraft is that the bricky nature of the world does start to make my eyes hurt after a while of staring into its pixelated abyss.
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Thankfully, this is avoided in LEGO Fortnite with its gorgeous realism mixed with a smattering of blocky brilliance.
Conclusion: A Victory Royale Or Eating Dirt?
LEGO Fortnite is a fantastic survival sandbox Minecraft competitor. Though lacking some quality-of-life features, its gameplay loop and incredible graphics, paired with the goofy fun of Fortnite characters and its charm, makes for an astounding Fortnite game mode.
Forget dropping at Titled Towers, drop into the incredible world of LEGO Fortnite instead.
