LEGO Minifigures Online: the first 15 minutes of play
Posted by Huw,
Whatever technical problems I experienced earlier have been resolved and I've been able to play the game. I'm not a regular games player any more (not since Quake), didn't play Universe and haven't even seen any of TT's LEGO games, so I'm no expert, but here are my impressions of the first 15 minutes of play.
After choosing your initial team of three minifigures, your character, the fighter of the three, appears in a world which, it turns out, is in a LEGO shop as you'll see from a screen shot below.
He goes round generally smashing things up an killing skeletons, jumping from one shelf in the shop to another.
As he does so, you're given guidance on how to play and what to do.
After killing the first 'boss', a tiger or something, you're awarded a new minifig from your team, who is a builder rather than a fighter. As she goes round, she rebuilds things rather than smashing them up.
As you approach piles of bricks, the cursor changes to three bricks indicating you can put something together. Sometimes this includes cannons for getting from one shelf to another, or bridges.
The minifigs you've unlocked are shown in the top right of the screen and can be selected by clicking on them. The red bar at the top shows their health and the yellow one at the bottom shows some other sort of 'power' you collect.
After completing this level you meet some other characters who encourage you to go to a pirate world.
I played if for a bit and then, frankly, got a bit bored.
It certainly looks polished and, once it had downloaded, ran smoothly enough on my PC. It's not something I'm likely to play much, but I suspect the target audience of 7-10 year old boys will love it. I don't have one to hand to test it with, though :-)
It appears that if you subscribe/pay you can do/get/go different things/places but I haven't figured that out yet.
Anyway, have a go and let us know what you think, and do please shed light on my vague ramblings if you can!
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25 comments on this article
The membership seems to give you access to side missions, extra points and generally speed up the acquisition of extra figures. It's all fairly point and click (though the building seemed to be a bit hit and miss for me) but I'd imagine the target audience will love it.
I had no problem installing and playing (although it sat downloading at 0.08 MB/s for ages but thankfully sped up before it told me it needed to download 4000 files at a total of 800MBs).
It seems I got a bit further than Huw before I got bored, but eventually the pointless repetitiveness and continually respawning annoyances got to me.
Once you've completed the intro you start to see other players in the world and can befriend them and create groups. Its all very nice and because you can't do more than pick from a list of names theres no opportunity for inappropriate content. However this raises two things...
1 - the game mechanic leads you to kill off medics first as they can heal the 'dangerous' enemies. This seems somewhat odd for a company that sticks to its moral compass so strongly.
2 - When theres more than 1 player around it all becomes a bit of a mess. Theres stuff going on everywhere, accomplishments are hit by others so you have little idea whats going on and it seems to get a bit jittery.
The games ok, but significantly flawed. Damn its repetitive, horribly so. The controls are annoying and if like me you'll end up running circles around the enemy your trying to hit. I know you can hold [shift] but even knowing that it still happened. I played with the cyclops and his special weapon is so likely to miss, leaving you unable to attack until it runs out, its more of a disadvantage than advantage. Also why can't i click through the very slow text balloons.
Obviously its not aimed at me, but thinking about my kids, I can't see them playing it for more than an hour. Theres much more polished, interesting, less repetitive and generally more enjoyable games out there for pc/tablet etc. that will hold their attention.
Haven't played this yet and might not, because this doesn't sound very good. I wonder how many different sets are in that LEGO shop which cunningly advertises their products?
I do want the Space Miner from the S12 figures, though. I love spacey figs.
the "Power points" you collect can be spent on making your character stronger (by spending them on 1 of the 3 stats) they reset to 0 (or did in beta) every level up so spend them before your next level up.
also the -10 age group is definitely the target, and the game feels much simpler than Lego Universe was. also with the lack of individualization I think older players will get bored with the cookie cutter style of playing as the same few characters and seeing 100 others identical to you.
The achievements though lead to repeatedly going after targets and can drag on but in general are a nice challenge.
the visuals are rather nice though and with the inclusion of more worlds the game is quite large. over all its a solid game, still some things need smoothing but its Beta after all. kids will love it, its safe, but its also "sterile" the interaction is very limited and even though it is an MMO you don't have the ability to chat and enjoy a hard fought fight with friends. your best to play with people you are in voice range of, as you will want to share the joy and that's really the only viable way to do so.
currently for adult play I give it a 6/10: play for free and know its a kids game I bet you'll find it entertaining
for kids I give it a 8.5/10: easy to learn and has plenty for kids while being a very safe game parents will not have to worry about.
I was part of the Beta testing and to be honest was able to get in the game once without difficulty...every time I tried after that it was difficult to get the game to work so I just gave up. Now that it is open Beta I'm hoping it it a little easier to play.
I have been playing for an hour, and have reached 'Volcano Island.' It is not too bad I have found and I had no problems actually getting it to run in the first place, but I would agree with others who find it a bit repetitive.
There are some fun characters though, and I agree with Huw that the game looks great with regard to aesthetics.
Weird. Last thing that I heard via email Monday was that closed beta was done, and we would be notified when open beta started. There never was any info about open beta starting already.
I think the only way for it to work would be to choose the Gypsy, Bee, and Roman soldier as the first characters. It didn't work with the other two sets.
^ worked fine for me with the monster, plumber and forest maiden (?)
Sadly, The game does not support the type of computer I am using, so I can not 'have a go'. Although it looks great!
So once again LEGO takes the most creative and inspiring toy on the planet and knocks out a dull and repetitve game about wanton destruction. Meanwhile genuinely creative and inspiring games like Little Big Planet and Minecraft are huge runaway successes.
But that's just an AFOL's opinion, so it doesn't really count.
^ That sums it up nicely! I was surprised to be smashing things up and battling skeletons minutes into the game rather than doing something constructive.
^^ Yep, that's pretty spot on. I've been playing the game, with my kids, since the earliest beta. The gameplay has pretty much been fighting, fighting, and more fighting. Every now and then you can build a sign post with an arrow, but it's pretty pointless. As they rolled out upgrades to the game during the beta I kept assuming they would be incorporating more construction and puzzle-solving aspects to the game. Nope. Just more fighting. My kids even commented "So... it's just fighting? I'm going to go play Minecraft now." Pretty disappointing. About the only fun aspect of the game is seeing what attacks and animations the new characters possess and exhibit.
The Closed BETA is being turned on and off in various countries. In the US, I was only able to play for about 5 days, before they sent out a mass email announcing a shutdown for our access. We were told an Open BETA would occur in a short period of time and our access would be renabled then.
some may have progressed far enough to encounter a few boss fights, those do have a puzzle aspect (only by doing certain things in the right order can you beat them alone) its still fighting, but some thinking is required. aside from that its read messages and then go fighting. at least Lego Universe had build points and other things of reasonable size to auto build. and that's not even going into LU Properties, which were sandbox lots to build anything you could think up with the bricks you had earned.
also keep in mind this game is intended to work on PC and Mobile devices, which I think is what really hurts this game. how do you build a game for mobile and still have an excellent PC game? I've not seen it done yet, and no game has free building on mobile device that I know of.
I use to play Lego Universe and it was amazing. This game, on the other hand is a rather let-down. To much repetition and fighting. Fighting is fine by me if you include challenges and need for strategy. That's not here though. With competition such as Minecraft and Roblox (both games look like Lego), this game doesn't have any chance. I even predict it to fold even quicker than Lego Universe.
I guess for me it's back to Lego Racers.
I was in the closed Beta. My takeaway was that it was a Diablo clone with Minifigs. My one repeating thought was "it took them years to develop this?" It would be a decent browser or tablet game. Not an A list PC game.
I used to play LEGO Universe, so I thought I would give this game a try. Unfortunately, like almost everyone else, I got bored pretty fast.
LEGO Universe had a lot of the gameplay focused on fighting and smashing things too, but at least it gave us patches of land and bricks so that we could build anything we wanted. We could even add simple programming and behaviors to the things we built too. It was really cool. You could build a fortress, a pirate ship, or a space base, and then explore and interact with it from a Minifigure's perspective.
I got to play this in the early beta and I agree, it's just too easy for an adult. That's not meant as a criticism though, as adults aren't really who this game is for. I'd rather it be a game that kids can enjoy without getting too frustrated than a game that requires adult skills. And because it's lego, the shooting and other violence feels lowkey, even though you ARE constantly killing things.
Wow, it sounds great! I haven't played yet because my computer is having problems with the game. I am working on fixing the problems with LEGO so I can play.
So glad I saw this post! Downloading now...
I've noticed that when "smashing" certain figures you collect bricks of various sizes and colors. The shapes and sizes don't seem to relate to the bricks we use to increase our attributes. Is this so we can build at some point later in the game?
@JusJeff the random bricks you collect go into a collection of sorts, you can level these up and unlock other bricks over time, the only use I've found so far are little images you can fill in with bricks, these images give stat boosts, and bigger boosts can be gained using higher level bricks or larger bricks. the little images are a castle tower, a fish, and a dino that I can remember, I know there are a few others as well.
The LEGO Minifigures client has encountered a problem and needs to close...
I hope the problem will be solved.
"This game must be downloaded and played on a Windows PC" – Seriously, which gaming company with respect for themselves doesn't release a game on a Mac-platform as well as the Windows?