Review: LEGO Fortnite Feels Like a Solid Foundation

LEGO Fortnite feels like one of the best surprises in gaming in a long time. Epic Games and LEGO came together to offer a survival experience that feels like an amalgamation of multiple titles into one monumental offering. It may not be perfect, but it lays the foundation for something special.

LEGO Fortnite feels like a mix of games like Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Story of Seasons, and Animal Crossing. It takes the standard survival and building mechanics of Minecraft, tosses in farming and relationships from Story of Seasons, and has the idea of building houses and recruiting lovable villagers, like in Animal Crossing.

This makes for a massive and beautiful adventure where players make their LEGO worlds and survive or build within them. The aesthetic is fantastic, as classic characters and creatures from Fortnite have a glossy new blocky look. This works well, giving LEGO Fortnite an appearance that looks better than the main game, in my opinion.

The overall survival experience feels like the heart of the game right now. It carefully guides players through their custom world with tutorials on how to build villages, create houses, upgrade their town, gain new villagers, and more. The various biomes, ranging from the grasslands to the snowy areas, offer various materials and monsters to tackle.

But LEGO Fortnite feels, in many ways, like the original Minecraft did near its alpha launch. There is a clear game here, even with a final boss-like monster at the end, but the overall experience is a bit shallow. Even the various custom worlds you can create all feel a bit too samey at times in their design and style.

Sure, there are lots of buildings and materials to gather, but I will admit that LEGO Fortnite loses its luster over time, especially if you don’t have people to play it with. It becomes a quick and repetitive chore to go into that cave, farm some materials, return and craft your desired upgrade, and repeat the cycle.

Smart elements like villagers being able to go out and gather resources help with this, but it only goes so far. Within a dozen hours, you’ll probably see everything the game pretty much has to offer. What holds it back is the lack of features to keep the experience going past this point. After all, the actual building in this game feels a bit clunky and odd.

There are blueprints for houses and certain items you can follow, which makes it accessible for newcomers. But you can also use custom parts to make your creations. Unfortunately, these planks, platforms and the like still feel like they are forcing you into a box of what you can and can’t do. This isn’t like Minecraft in the way that every item is essentially a similar block, so it feels a bit too restrictive at times.

Fortunately, there is room for some creativity, such as creating a flying car Tears of the Kingdom-style. That said, it all gets pretty boring quite fast, and it comes down to the closed-off nature of the game and only 10 levels for villages. It doesn’t help that the game isn’t too forgiving (at least in survival) when it comes to moving structures.

If you build your village up with a dozen houses and structures and then want to move it to a different biome, it doesn’t let you easily do that. You have to destroy every single piece and rebuild them again elsewhere. Sure, games like Minecraft also have a similar idea, but the building in this game is already so cumbersome that it would be nice to have some quality-of-life features here.

Then there is the combat, which also feels somewhat awkward to control. Oddly, the combat in this game doesn’t take after Fortnite completely, so don’t expect your shotty to be here. Instead, it has some slow hack-and-slash moves and a dodge. I like the dodge but everything feels slower than it should, which led to me getting hit more than I would like.

LEGO Fortnite could be truly special with more villagers, better quality-of-life features, and a general sense of direction. For now, it remains a solid but incomplete foundation. It is great fun for a time, but it will need some improvements and additions before it becomes a more permanent video game home for me to live in.

LEGO Fortnite is available for the Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PC, and Android devices.