[Mobile games] Lego Fortnite Review

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Surprising absolutely no one, Fortnite and Lego snap satisfyingly together like a couple of plastic construction bricks. Combining the building creativity of Lego sets with Fortnite's expansive and often gorgeous island playgrounds is a smart match that creates an approachable yet fairly deep survival game. But while it streamlines a few of the more cumbersome aspects of the genre, Lego Fortnite also has the distinct feel of an early access game, trading as much on its future potential as its currently polished systems. There's a solid foundation here that developer Epic Games will surely build on over time, but Lego Fortnite can feel somewhat empty at launch – what's here is fun, there's just not very much of it. If you're familiar with survival games like Minecraft or Valheim, you'll immediately find yourself at home in Fortnite's riff on the genre, as it uses tried-and-true blueprints rather than starting from scratch. Dropped on a procedurally generated island that's still loosely contained within Fortnite's larger time-loopy fiction, you need to gather food and other resources to keep yourself alive. As you get more materials, you can craft tools and weapons, which let you fight off deadly creatures and gather even better materials, and then make better tools and weapons so you can search for still deadlier creatures and still rarer materials. It's an extremely well-worn track at this point, and Lego Fortnite makes no attempt to lay down its own rails.

Instead, it focuses on reducing friction by providing you with a whole bunch of helpful NPCs to lighten the load. While a lot of survival games include cooperative multiplayer, Lego Fortnite makes cooperation its central theme. You can join up with as many as seven other players, but even if you're alone, you'll have NPCs around to take a lot of the pressure off. It's an adjustment that lets Lego Fortnite maintain the trappings of survival while relaxing the burden overall, and at times can lessen the grind that often defines this sort of game – although there's still plenty of grind to go around. From the start in any new game, other characters are hanging around both to offer you tutorial information and to help out. Rather than building random shelter structures to keep yourself alive, you can construct a town square that turns your location into a village that attracts NPC Fortnite characters. Visitors will flow in and out of your village freely and defend it from any enemies that happen by, and you can entice some of them to become permanent residents by advancing through 10 village levels. That gives you something of a workforce almost from the very beginning, and you can assign NPCs to forage for materials or work your different crafting benches, providing you with free resources every so often. It's like always having other players around to help you, freeing you up somewhat to focus on things that are more enticing than standing at a workbench, waiting for food to cook. The Fortnite side of the equation adds some interesting new wrinkles. “ That help makes it a little easier to enjoy on the best part of Lego Fortnite, which is striking out into the world to find new resources to improve your stuff. The Fortnite side of the equation adds some interesting wrinkles here, like a version of the battle royale mode's storm with lightning strikes that will drive you into cover, llamas and supply drops that dispense random loot, and rifts that spawn a little dance party on a cloud into the world, which you can join with your Fortnite emotes. There's not a ton beyond that stuff and some recognizable skins to identify this as a Fortnite spin-off, but the additions still bring some extra flavor to the world and open the door for future possibilities. Combat is the same clunky style as Minecraft or Valheim, where you mostly stand and whack at enemies with a sword between blocking their assaults with a shield, with a dodge roll that gives you a little extra agility when you need it. Lego Fortnite uses NPCs to lower the stakes a bit here, too, as you can recruit any friendly character to explore with you, instantly doubling your odds in a fight. If they die, NPCs respawn a few seconds later barely any worse for wear (although without any of the equipment you gave them). It's an option that maintains the feel of adventuring while lowering the barrier of entry and the risk.

https://www.ign.com/articles/lego-fortnite-review