Lego Fortnite is big on authenticity. During my recent preview session, the game’s developers repeatedly noted how they recreated 10,000 authentic Lego bricks in digital form, using those bricks to then create creatures and characters that are – again – authentic to the guidelines for actual Lego sets. It’s effectively impossible for me to judge how well Lego Fortnite can fulfill its ambitions as the 30-minute demo I got ahead of the game’s official release offered nowhere near enough time to really poke at its systems, but I came away thrilled by its potential.
You might have noted that I’ve joined Epic in calling this a “game,” not a “game mode,” despite the fact that Lego Fortnite is launching within the battle royale. Calling this anything short of a whole new game is genuinely doing it a disservice. Its interface has some similarities to mainline Fortnite, but this is a lot more than just a skin. For example, there’s a new, procedurally generated map that’s 20 times the size of the battle royale, populated with NPCs to talk to, enemies to fight, and – of course – resources to collect and items to craft.
If you’ve poured hours into any survival crafting game, from Minecraft to Valheim, none of the basics here will surprise you; there’s a hunger meter, and you still punch trees to collect wood. Some of the more advanced systems are exciting, though. There’s a village building element where you can construct a town, recruit NPCs to stay there, and give them jobs like collecting local resources or crafting certain tools.
Maybe the most exciting part is the one I didn’t have time to explore at all: vehicle construction. The devs demonstrated a few possibilities and it looks like Lego Fortnite offers almost Tears of the Kingdom-style building options. You can construct a shack and attach some wheels and a rocket engine to it for an uber-speedy mobile home. Or you could tie a bunch of balloons to it in order to build a makeshift airship.
I even was told that, during testing, one player managed to build an entire village as part of an airship, with recruited NPCs doing their thing as the whole city floated through the sky. Other early constructions apparently also included a castle built around an underground lava river, and a makeshift rollercoaster built out of a bunch of wheels lining a wooden track. This is the part of Lego Fortnite I’m most excited to see, and I’m dying to learn what further possibilities there are.
I’m also happy to report that Lego Fortnite smartly integrates some of the best features you’ll see in other survival crafting games like the option to leave your world open to friends so they can play and make progress even when you’re not around. There’s also a full sandbox mode that works equivalently to Minecraft’s Creative mode. The devs also say that they’ll be continuing to support Lego Fortnite similarly to how they’ve supported the battle royale, which means you can expect new content to drop as the seasons roll on.
It’s admittedly going to take dozens of hours to really see if Lego Fortnite is as cool as it seems, but I’m already impressed enough that I already feel committed to pouring the time into finding out. Luckily, I won’t be waiting much longer to get started, since Lego Fortnite is set to launch today.
Lego Fortnite seems poised to be one of the best Lego games out there.