LEGO Universe brings the LEGO play experience online in the first MMOG – massively-multiplayer online game – created for LEGO fans of all ages. In LEGO Universe you will discover a world that sparks the imagination, full of opportunities to build, play and interact with LEGO fans from all over the globe. Build anything you can dream up, and help shape the constantly evolving LEGO Universe through adventure, exploration and battle in an original storyline.
As always, safety for children is the LEGO Group’s top priority. LEGO Universe is a great way for families to play together in a safe online environment, and is designed to foster creativity and social interaction in young children and veteran gamers alike.
LEGO Universe represents a collaboration between the LEGO Group and fans, who have been called upon to help shape the game world – from testing and contributing ideas, to building actual game content alongside professional developers.
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My little boys have been eagerly awaiting the release of LEGO Universe for months! Thank goodness it’s finally arrived…!
LEGO Universe is a Massively Multiplayer Online Game. A terrible evil – the Maelstrom – is trying to destroy imagination and it’s up to you, and the other players, to defeat it.
At the start of the game you are a basic minifigure. You have the option to customise yourself, name yourself and then you’re off! You start off in a damaged spaceship which is the tutorial section before you hit the game proper. This introduces you to the Lego environment and how you interact with it. You can move around and interact using just the keyboard, or a mixture of keyboard and mouse if you prefer. The controls are pretty intuitive and all of us were up and running in very little time. Once you’ve mastered the controls you get to build yourself a rocket, (this is the mode of transport between the different worlds from now on), and escape from the spaceship, landing in Avant Gardens. This world furthers the tutorial with the introduction of enemies and missions, and is your route to Nimbus Station which is the gateway to all the other worlds.
There are four different factions in this game. Once you have completed a number of initial missions you are invited to choose the faction that you wish to join. This choice is irreversible. At this point it is probably worth noting that you have up to four minifigures to play the game with, so it is possible to have one of each faction if you wish. You can then go on to complete further missions to increase your level and gain more powers and abilities. The game follows the usual RPG template of completing missions and defeating enemies to gain money and rewards and for the older player, every world has numerous objectives to be completed and objects to be found. The record of your progress in each world is stored in your passport.
Whilst many aspects of this game can be found in other RPGs, for my sons it is the detail that makes this game stand apart from others. Whilst they find the game play and completing the missions absorbing, the game also contains lots of extras such as: being able to train pets, (a big favourite!); mini games, (including a racing game); buying and selling items and the ability to create your own property. The general level of detail is also stunning – for example there are flaming heads which, when you have the water sprayer, you can spray and they go out, spin, look sad and then light up again. Things like this keep my sons occupied for ages!! The graphics in general are very good, and very detailed…although of course they are cartoon-style graphics so may not wow some people.
At this point we haven’t really explored the social side of the game, as my little boys are quite happy wandering around doing their own thing. Obviously this might be quite a big part of the game for some, as you can play as a team, but for us it’s not all that relevant right now so I can’t comment on this aspect.
Overall I’m very impressed with this game and I’m quite happy to let my little boys play on it. They love it – and with the choice of different things to do within the game I am confident that they won’t get bored any time soon. Another great aspect from a parental point of view is that any violence simply results in you, or your enemy, being “smashed” and reduced your constituent Lego pieces…so no blood and guts. There is a high level of moderation when it comes to interactions in this game and also when naming characters, (my son wasn’t allowed to call his cat pet an obvious name for example). This leaves me feeling relatively reassured that they’re not going to unwittingly be exposed to any nastiness online.
Included with the game is a 30 day subscription – allowing you access for just the first 30 days. After that you have to pay to continue to play and you have the option of paying for a month, six months or a year. I’ve never had to pay a subscription to play a game before, so this is a bit of a shock to the system…I guess it’s a good job that my little boys are hooked and should get a lot of use out of it! Highly recommended!
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You know, there’s something just flat wonderful about Lego. Back when I was a kid I couldn’t have enough of them! As an adult, I had a wonderful Lego city that included a lighthouse, police department, pizzaria, roads, landscaping and even, in one corner of it, some old West sets that I made to look like a movie was being filmed. Good times, good times.
I don’t own much in the way of Lego now. I have one small minifigure of a traveler and that’s about it. But on the other hand I have and enjoy “Lego Batman” and was fortunate enough to participate in the beta testing for this fine game, “Lego Universe.”
LU is a MMORPG. Like any of the sort, such as “World of Warcraft”, you make a character and run around doing quests while accumulating treasure. Unlike any others I’ve seen, you get to have your own bit of land and you can use that to build your own Lego paradise! In practice it’s not as simple to do as you might like, but once you get used to using the building tools, it’s very fun.
The game itself is easy, but not overly so. There’s plenty of in-game help and tools and unlike many other games, they’re actually useful. There’s also a lovely design aesthetic to the game, and some serious chuckles at some of the elements and cut scenes.
Now bear in mind this is a game directed primarily at children. As such, you’ll run into a lot more restrictions than normal, which even carries over into your name. You create a default name at first using approved words (my first character? Dazzling Garlic Toad). You can submit a name of your own, but it’s subject to approval by the game makers.
That said, though, it’s still a very fun and enjoyable game and one that I’d highly recommend for kids or just anyone who is into Lego!
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This game is a blast and is fun for kids of all ages (including us adult kids). My 12 year old daughter and my 9 year old son LOVE this game. They look forward to playing this game each day, and since the game has a creative aspect as well as the fact that I know LEGO moderators are supplying a safe online environment for my kids, it makes it easier for me to allow the kids to play more often.
I recommend this highly to anyone looking for a game for their kids that will allow them to play online with their friends in a safe online environment.
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Hi All, this sounds like a great game in principle until I saw on TV that the monthly subscription is £7.49 per month . This is supposed to be for kids isn’t it, I don’t agree with it, where is a nine year old supposed to get £7.49 per month? Seeing as I limit my Children to 1 hour a night on their PC’s it seems very expensive. I ordered the game and then cancelled it when I found out about this. It wasn’t apparent when I read the description.
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We have two boys age 6 and 9 and they both have great fun with this game. When the little one gets stuck the big brother gladly helps out. Watching over the shoulder and also having made my own character I can only marvel over the easy to use interface and the simple fun this game gives. No killing, just smashing the baddies and they will rebuild (re-spawn) in a little while. The chat is clearly moderated so no bad words can be typed and there is also a quick way of saying “thank you” or “Well Done” using a menu system. Using the later also provides some fun animations to match. The game play is simple, but in a good way! Example is our 6 year old who will do quests and do trading with the vendors in the game without any help. He also loves the various plat form game aspects, like the Monument you encounter early in the game. Here you have to run to the top using different paths and abilities to get there the fastest way possible. A nice feature is that your time is recorded and shown against the friends you make along the way in the game, rather that your number x out of thousands although you can still see that too if interested. The use of bright colors and the familiar LEGO bricks make it an inviting place to re-visit. When not in the mode for quests, there is a race track where as you win, you get better items for the modular LEGO racer you own. Best of all you can go build on your own bit of land using the bricks you collect in the game too! All in all it has become a daily 30-60 minutes well spend on just having fun! …and should we get some small engineers out of the brick building as a side bonus, then thats good too right
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Why should we pay nearly £20 for a game and then pay out another £7.50 a month to play it, its not fair and Lego should be ashamed. My son so wanted this game but then we found out we had to pay each month, this should be made illegal for kids games.
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i have read the other reviews and have seen that you have to pay each month for a game which you may of spent £30 this is what game will charge you if yu buy it from there and then they charge you i think this is a scandle
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First, the pro:
-Entertaining characters, animations, and ideas.
-Some good instruction/tutorial aspects, but. . . (see cons)
-Build modes are good for creative expression and a must for a lego game, but. . . (see cons)
-Cute pets.
Now the cons:
-Many of the instruction/tutorial aspects become annoying, almost to the point of frustrating, since the are location triggered and repeat every single time you pass that location. The pop-up type are only slightly annoying, while the slow-camera-pans are incredibly frustrating the 50th time you see them.
-Build modes: while there is a lot of freedom, the interface/camera can be awkward. There are even some parts that I’ve never been able to figure out how to line up and connect. One example would be the medium rock monster II body and medium rock monster II arm, obviously meant to go together, do not line up as there is no way to “lift” the arms off the ground.
-SHORT. Very short. The amount of actual content in the game is not worth a monthly fee. I completed every quests (except those which require 3 or more people to happen along at the same time, such as the racing quests) within the first week of playing (I pre-ordered and started playing with the early founder’s launch, not the general launch). I had also collected all pets and a completed a very large majority of the achievements. This was with approximately 18-20 hours of game-play that included traveling to every vendor and standing around browsing their entire inventory, playing the pirate shooting gallery mini-game at length, spending time building on my properties, and standing around grinding the same monsters over and over in order to collect infected bricks and faction tokens (more on those later).
-MMO? Where’s the MMO in this game. Let’s look at what makes an MMO different than a single player game.
-Grouping: Nope. No grouping or teaming. . . other than getting lucky and having someone else join in a couple of the instanced mini-games at the same time you are doing them.
-Auction or item sale mechanism: Nope. There is a direct person to person trade mechanism. That’s all.
-Chat with others: Well, you can send a “tell” or “whisper” type private message that creates a private chat channel, if you have someone specific with whom to chat. Then there is the “local” chat; this is a general open-world chat that is only seen/heard for a very, very short distance. That’s a about it for chat avenues, but what about chat content? Being a game intended for a younger audience, a somewhat restrictive chat filter is expected. Unfortunately, being that it’s a white-list system rather than a black-list system, it’s overly restrictive. The difference is that a white-list system is one of specific inclusion, rather than one of specific exclusion. The result is that you cannot even say the names of other players or even the names of the monsters themselves at this point. “Where would I find 5 (or five) spiderlings to finish this quest?” becomes “Where would I find fingers on my hand of the long leg things to finish this quest?” (numbers, in numerical or alphabet, are restricted as a way to prevent kids from disclosing private info). Of course, you have to get lucky enough to be near to someone long enough to type this out.
-Factions, tokens, and gear: In a word, pointless.
-Factions give you specializations; classes in other games. All attributes are linked to gear, including your the skills/powers you get from specializations. So, this leads to:
-Gear: your faction specialization gear isn’t the strongest gear in the game. Once you’ve completed all of the quests, and a large number of achievements, you’ll find that you are better off using some of the reward gear from these instead of the faction gear (at least, in the case of the specialization I played), even though you forgo the powers given by specializing. And how do you get your faction gear, anyway?
-Faction tokens; the only MMO mechanic actually included in the game. Unfortunately, it’s probably the worst one they could have included. You may know this mechanic as “the grind”. In order to buy the faction gear, you have to collect and spend faction tokens. This is the only reason to pay a monthly subscription, since it will most likely take you months to collect enough tokens to get all of your gear. . . But then, see my previous point about gear. I will say that each faction has useful, inexpensive consumables that can also require faction tokens to purchase.
In short, what is there is generally fun and well done, there just isn’t much of it, and it’s not much of an MMO. Some of the critiques I have will surely be addressed in future patches (such as balancing the gear to make specializations worthwhile, which I’m sure they are working on and is probably part of the reason the third specialization for each faction has been delayed, and grouping, which they have said will be added in the future). They have also said that they are going to release frequent content additions. Unfortunately, with as small as the initial game is, I don’t think they will have many subscribers left playing by the time they get there.
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I have not played the game nor even loaded it on my computer. When I received it from Amazon today, I was dismayed to read on the front of the package that, after one month’s free use, there is a monthly subscription fee that must be paid to continue to to use the game. No where in or on the package, nor in the instruction book, was the amount of that fee specified. After a net search I found a Wiki article that gave a fee chart — $10.00 per month, with discounts for six month or one year subscriptions
What really angers me is that the description of the product on Amazon makes no mention of a monthly fee being required for game use. Perhaps monthly subscription fees are common for video games and it is assumed that buyers would know this. However, not being familiar with the video game world, (I purchased this to be used by my grandchildren during their visits), it took me by complete surprise. It seems to me that a roughly $120.00 per year use cost should be conspicuously flagged by Amazon in the product description.
Another small point that should be noted is that the Amazon product description indicates that the product may be used with only Windows XP and Vista. But the label on the DVD just says “WIN MAC” — not exactly definitively descriptive. The included manual is not much help either. Under “Hardware Requirements” no information is to be found other than direction to a LegoUniverse web site.
Other reviews of Lego Universe to be found here give generally positive, if not glowing comments about the game. Obviously, I am in no position to comment on the game itself and must defer to those who have actually used it. My purpose here is simply to alert potential buyers that this video game is ultimately going to cost them far more than the initial purchase price.
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My Son loves this game, fantastic and very parent friendly too,
What people need to understand is that yes there is a monthly subscription but the reason for this is because its a massively multiplayer game, Thousands+ kids can play on-line all at the same time, and your creations in Lego are accessible by everyone else as you can access there’s too, so Lego must use constant on-line servers hundreds of them constantly running and accessible to everyone all the time, and these servers are very expensive to run so that’s why Lego charge for the subscription, lets not forget they are a business and so if the ran it for free the game dev costs wouldn’t be covered simply by selling the game only, so i find it very unfair you parents are giving negative scores to the reviews based on something you haven’t actually purchase???
if your unhappy paying a subscription then don’t no one forces you, but the fact my son gets hours and hours of enjoyment, and not from a mind numbing games that encourage nothing but a game that encourages creativity and development, my child has quite clearly shown an interest in game development, so I have been trying to teach him some very basic Java and applets which he is very good at, and I feel games like this will easily help him develop level design and community based design.
anyone who wants to try a game like this but without the subscription fees should try Roblox its free to download and play, but also has a subscription model for those wishing to design levels, my son also loves that game too.
other games I would recommend is LittleBigPlanet, Viva Pinata and Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts all are great for Kids and Adults alike.
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