Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)First, the pro:
-Entertaining characters, animations, and ideas.
-Some good instruction/tutorial aspects, but. . . (see cons)
-Build modes are good for creative expression and a must for a lego game, but. . . (see cons)
-Cute pets.
Now the cons:
-Many of the instruction/tutorial aspects become annoying, almost to the point of frustrating, since the are location triggered and repeat every single time you pass that location. The pop-up type are only slightly annoying, while the slow-camera-pans are incredibly frustrating the 50th time you see them.
-Build modes: while there is a lot of freedom, the interface/camera can be awkward. There are even some parts that I've never been able to figure out how to line up and connect. One example would be the medium rock monster II body and medium rock monster II arm, obviously meant to go together, do not line up as there is no way to "lift" the arms off the ground.
-SHORT. Very short. The amount of actual content in the game is not worth a monthly fee. I completed every quests (except those which require 3 or more people to happen along at the same time, such as the racing quests) within the first week of playing (I pre-ordered and started playing with the early founder's launch, not the general launch). I had also collected all pets and a completed a very large majority of the achievements. This was with approximately 18-20 hours of game-play that included traveling to every vendor and standing around browsing their entire inventory, playing the pirate shooting gallery mini-game at length, spending time building on my properties, and standing around grinding the same monsters over and over in order to collect infected bricks and faction tokens (more on those later).
-MMO? Where's the MMO in this game. Let's look at what makes an MMO different than a single player game.
-Grouping: Nope. No grouping or teaming. . . other than getting lucky and having someone else join in a couple of the instanced mini-games at the same time you are doing them.
-Auction or item sale mechanism: Nope. There is a direct person to person trade mechanism. That's all.
-Chat with others: Well, you can send a "tell" or "whisper" type private message that creates a private chat channel, if you have someone specific with whom to chat. Then there is the "local" chat; this is a general open-world chat that is only seen/heard for a very, very short distance. That's a about it for chat avenues, but what about chat content? Being a game intended for a younger audience, a somewhat restrictive chat filter is expected. Unfortunately, being that it's a white-list system rather than a black-list system, it's overly restrictive. The difference is that a white-list system is one of specific inclusion, rather than one of specific exclusion. The result is that you cannot even say the names of other players or even the names of the monsters themselves at this point. "Where would I find 5 (or five) spiderlings to finish this quest?" becomes "Where would I find fingers on my hand of the long leg things to finish this quest?" (numbers, in numerical or alphabet, are restricted as a way to prevent kids from disclosing private info). Of course, you have to get lucky enough to be near to someone long enough to type this out.
-Factions, tokens, and gear: In a word, pointless.
-Factions give you specializations; classes in other games. All attributes are linked to gear, including your the skills/powers you get from specializations. So, this leads to:
-Gear: your faction specialization gear isn't the strongest gear in the game. Once you've completed all of the quests, and a large number of achievements, you'll find that you are better off using some of the reward gear from these instead of the faction gear (at least, in the case of the specialization I played), even though you forgo the powers given by specializing. And how do you get your faction gear, anyway?
-Faction tokens; the only MMO mechanic actually included in the game. Unfortunately, it's probably the worst one they could have included. You may know this mechanic as "the grind". In order to buy the faction gear, you have to collect and spend faction tokens. This is the only reason to pay a monthly subscription, since it will most likely take you months to collect enough tokens to get all of your gear. . . But then, see my previous point about gear. I will say that each faction has useful, inexpensive consumables that can also require faction tokens to purchase.
In short, what is there is generally fun and well done, there just isn't much of it, and it's not much of an MMO. Some of the critiques I have will surely be addressed in future patches (such as balancing the gear to make specializations worthwhile, which I'm sure they are working on and is probably part of the reason the third specialization for each faction has been delayed, and grouping, which they have said will be added in the future). They have also said that they are going to release frequent content additions. Unfortunately, with as small as the initial game is, I don't think they will have many subscribers left playing by the time they get there.
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Lego: Universe
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