Remember when Fortnite was just about building? Before its celebrity cameos, its attention-grabbing live events, before you could play battle royale in Zero Build, and before the game let users make up their own endless variety of modes. Fortnite was a simpler game – you constructed a base, defended it from enemies. And in some ways, today’s big launch of Lego Fortnite feels a return to those simpler times.
Where the original Fortnite Save The World mode was a tower defense title, Lego Fortnite – in its current iteration at least – borrows mostly from Minecraft. You chop down trees and mine rocks for Lego resources, which can be crafted into Lego pickaxes, swords, or Lego building chunks. Said chunks – clusters of Lego bricks arranged into archways or staircases, campfires or even full buildings – can then be used to construct your own settlements. Finally, over time, you can grow and level up these settlements to welcome in a group of friendly characters, who can be assigned some of the more menial jobs such as farming and harvesting.
All of this plays out in a world which looks similar enough to Fortnite itself – its fresh Unreal Engine 5-powered iteration, that is, not last month’s Fortnite OG – where Lego characters and monsters roam. UE5 means your constructions are as permanent (or destructible) as you make them – able to be edited, customised, or blown to smithereens in impressive style – individual Lego elements tumbling away in remarkably believable fashion.
The world of Lego Fortnite can be explored in a Sandbox mode without dangers, or in a Survival offering where hostile creatures wander the map, or lurk in caves underground. You’ll need to armour up to take on the toughest of these and protect your own creations – at one point I saw a house I’d been building smashed as an enormous dinosaur-troll-thing charged through it towards me, bricks flying in all directions.