Each week Marsh Davies squints at the ambitious blueprint that is Early Access and struggles to work out which bit goes where, and how many pieces are missing, before giving up and, most likely, building a big old cock instead. This week he’s been playing Lego Worlds, TT Games’ attempt to channel the charm of Minecraft’s freeform construction at the behest of their brick-wielding Danish overlords.
Finally, Lego have made a game about Lego rather than the Lego brand. Though they quite possibly only managed that because someone else went and did it first. Every dismayingly poor TT Games platformer I’ve played has only further convinced me that Markus Persson already made the best possible Lego game - and as just one facet of that multifaceted monster, Minecraft. Its shadow looms large over this entire enterprise. Though it’s an enterprise that seems to be getting wise to this fact: some of the recent releases under the Lego brand are, I am told, interesting and ambitious in their own right, and not just quirky minifig rehashes of film properties, draped over a crap but childproof platformer framework. So perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that Worlds, too, feels interesting and ambitious - albeit extremely early in its development. There’s not much about it at the moment that Minecraft hasn’t covered in mods, but it’s nonetheless immediate, generous and jolly, its focus shifted away from Minecraft’s complex recipes and resources to simple collection and unfettered creation.
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