Lego Universe

Hobbes

I thought I'd give a review of this as I have played it for a week. I am probably not going to play it beyond the 1 month trial.

If you have a lego fetish you will love this game. The level of customization you can do on creating stuff is incredible. The little characters are cute and well done. Attention to detail is good, and even just logging in is funny.

Quests are somewhat routine and later on get very very annoying. They are not designed for kids and are out of sequence. For example one quest you need to scare some guards with an emote. Except the actual emote you need you don't get until you complete all the quests in the zone AND complete the instance game (kill a dragon). I wasted 30 mins trying to beat the quest before I realised I couldn't. Quite a few of them appear impossible and I wasn't even able to solve without googling the answer. Trust me, some you would not just guess.

Moving between zones requires getting a rocket built and dropping it to jump on it at a zone point. It gets annoying fast.

Appears to be gear based to level. This means a lot of the stuff you get becomes useless fast or straight away. Which you can't hang onto due to limited backpack space.

Stats fall into 3 areas.
Health
Armor
Imagination.

Imagination being the main one to power up special moves or activate stuff. You can whack random items to get fully powered up easily. Later levels requires to armor up. Again you can get items to power up easily, same with gold.

The only other items are lego pieces and models. Models are finished lego items for you (eg. Car, kitchen wall). You can strip them down to get more lego blocks.

Creating items in Lego requires to get some land (easy enough). Placing the lego is tedious and slow. There is no way to sort the lego, so you spend ages looking through the lego only to find you don't have the piece you need.

The amount of lego you can get covers everything except theme based (Eg. no harry potter).

First annoying thing is pet taming. Except for the starter pets it nearly always fails. You don't either have enough lego to tame the pet, or the wrong parts. No idea if it is intentional or not. Double clicking to activate the pets in your pack doesn't always work, so your left asking to move the pet in your pack.

Second annoying part is the racing. The racing is actually quite fun and customizing the car is fun. Actual racing requires timing and knowing the track to deny others powerups. The problem is that you can't actually race unless you have one other person to race against. So if you have quests to complete on the race track you may as well not bother if no one is around. Also if people quit the race before it completes stops you from completing quests (and if you are a good driver this is quite frequent).

The single most annoying part of the game is the censoring. Everything is censored to death. You create a lego model you have to wait for it be approved by a GM before you can use it. Tame a pet and name it you need it approved. This isn't so bad except for talking to people.

Every word you type is checked against a censor before you are even allowed to send it. I can understand for swear words but the level of censorship is unreal.

Imagine being in an instance and your trying to tell your teammate to do something only to find that it has frozen from sending. Your forced to cursor back to the word and think of another word.

To give some examples. Someone asks me how to complete his quest. I say.

"You need to pick up 6 pipes" (6 is censored).
"You need to pick up six pipes" (six is censored).
"You need to pick up VI pipes" (VI censored)
"pick up pipes" (approved).

Or someone asking how to page a GM (which annoyed me).
"Press H then page a GM" (H censored)
"Press HKey then page a GM" (HKey censored)
"Press Help Key then Page a GM" (GM censored)
"Press the Help key and page" (approved)
They then ask me "what key is the help key?"
"It is the (H)elp key" - This went through then I got a warning saying my language was offensive and I would be banned if I continued.

Nehaxak

That censorship is mental :eek:
Wtf is wrong with the letter H ?
I can understand the censoring as it's a game aimed toward kids, was even thinking of getting it the other day for my son but censoring like what you've mentioned is just ridiculous.

humanji

I played the Beta and yeah, the censorship is bizarre. It's understandable to the point that it's a kids game, but you really have to wonder what they were thinking with some of it.

It reminded me of the Zelda games in that you complete a load of quests and move on to another area where you unlock a skill and go back to the first area to find more quests. The whole thing wasn't very deep, but I found it oddly soothing.

The races were great fun, I thought. But as said above, if nobody was about or if you were someone who quit if they didn't win, it was a pain.

I couldn't really recommend this to anyone unless you wanted your young kids to play an MMO, but I don't really think young kids should be lpaying computer games, so can't see this lasting particularly long.

copeyhagen

this reminds me of a free lego game my old mohaa clan used to play years and years ago, where you could build loads of leg0 **** and even fight each other..was actually great for a free game.