Surprising absolutely no one, Fortnite and Lego snap satisfyingly together like a couple of plastic construction bricks. Combining the building creativity of Lego sets with Fortnite's expansive and often gorgeous island playgrounds is a smart match that creates an approachable yet fairly deep survival game. But while it streamlines a few of the more cumbersome aspects of the genre, Lego Fortnite also has the distinct feel of an early access game, trading as much on its future potential as its currently polished systems. There's a solid foundation here that developer Epic Games will surely build on over time, but Lego Fortnite can feel somewhat empty at launch – what's here is fun, there's just not very much of it.
If you're familiar with survival games like Minecraft or Valheim, you'll immediately find yourself at home in Fortnite's riff on the genre, as it uses tried-and-true blueprints rather than starting from scratch. Dropped on a procedurally generated island that's still loosely contained within Fortnite's larger time-loopy fiction, you need to gather food and other resources to keep yourself alive. As you get more materials, you can craft tools and weapons, which let you fight off deadly creatures and gather even better materials, and then make better tools and weapons so you can search for still deadlier creatures and still rarer materials. It's an extremely well-worn track at this point, and Lego Fortnite makes no attempt to lay down its own rails.
Instead, it focuses on reducing friction by providing you with a whole bunch of helpful NPCs to lighten the load. While a lot of survival games include cooperative multiplayer, Lego Fortnite makes cooperation its central theme. You can join up with as many as seven other players, but even if you're alone, you'll have NPCs around to take a lot of the pressure off. It's an adjustment that lets Lego Fortnite maintain the trappings of survival while relaxing the burden overall, and at times can lessen the grind that often defines this sort of game – although there's still plenty of grind to go around.
From the start in any new game, other characters are hanging around both to offer you tutorial information and to help out. Rather than building random shelter structures to keep yourself alive, you can construct a town square that turns your location into a village that attracts NPC Fortnite characters. Visitors will flow in and out of your village freely and defend it from any enemies that happen by, and you can entice some of them to become permanent residents by advancing through 10 village levels. That gives you something of a workforce almost from the very beginning, and you can assign NPCs to forage for materials or work your different crafting benches, providing you with free resources every so often. It's like always having other players around to help you, freeing you up somewhat to focus on things that are more enticing than standing at a workbench, waiting for food to cook.
That help makes it a little easier to enjoy on the best part of Lego Fortnite, which is striking out into the world to find new resources to improve your stuff. The Fortnite side of the equation adds some interesting wrinkles here, like a version of the battle royale mode's storm with lightning strikes that will drive you into cover, llamas and supply drops that dispense random loot, and rifts that spawn a little dance party on a cloud into the world, which you can join with your Fortnite emotes. There's not a ton beyond that stuff and some recognizable skins to identify this as a Fortnite spin-off, but the additions still bring some extra flavor to the world and open the door for future possibilities.
Combat is the same clunky style as Minecraft or Valheim, where you mostly stand and whack at enemies with a sword between blocking their assaults with a shield, with a dodge roll that gives you a little extra agility when you need it. Lego Fortnite uses NPCs to lower the stakes a bit here, too, as you can recruit any friendly character to explore with you, instantly doubling your odds in a fight. If they die, NPCs respawn a few seconds later barely any worse for wear (although without any of the equipment you gave them). It's an option that maintains the feel of adventuring while lowering the barrier of entry and the risk.
If you do die, as is typical in the genre, whatever you were carrying is dropped at that spot and you'll have to set out to retrieve it. Even if you're alone, though, it's usually pretty trivial to venture out to any spot where you previously fell, thanks to the fact that Lego Fortnite maps feel big without being enormous. Special equipment pieces that improve your health and resilience or enhance your mobility, like an extremely useful glider, stick with your character even after you die, which also means you're not completely helpless upon respawning. It all contributes to a chill vibe that permeates throughout Lego Fortnite; There are challenges in the world, but they're never so much that you're dreading a corpse run or annoyed when a fight goes poorly.
However, the more time I spent exploring the world, the more I realized there isn't really much out there yet. There are no real goals other than grinding your way up the tech tree and improving your village, and as is often the case, you'll need to upgrade your stuff fully in one biome before you have the tools that will let you survive in the next. The three main biomes – Grasslands, Dry Valley (desert), and Frostlands (snowy mountains) – have their own features and styles, but there's little to find within them except the next kind of tree to cut or rock to mine, even when you delve into their often deep and somewhat spooky caves.
That meant I got out almost entirely what I put in when it came to fun. Lego Fortnite lacks the high stakes and frightening adventures of something like Valheim, where new biomes become drastically more deadly and sailing the seas brings surprising new sights and dangers. There's also no story or hidden mystery, like in Grounded or Sons of the Forest, to provide the drive to keep pushing out to see what you might find. There's a cool world here, but right now, it's fairly empty.
The Lego side of things informs all the building aspects, and it’s the other major area where Lego Fortnite sets itself apart. As in other survival games, constantly foraging for new materials unlocks different building pieces that let you construct things like houses, protective walls, and watchtowers. You can build freely by putting pieces together as you like, but there are also pre-built Lego structures you can create from blueprints you unlock automatically as you progress. These let you just plug in the right materials to create elaborate, neat-looking structures, allowing anyone to make aesthetically pleasing and functional villages regardless of their skill level as a builder. The blueprints are another way Lego Fortnite eases some of the traditionally grating elements of survival games, offering you ways to make great-looking dwellings with less time investment, if you so choose. There's also a Creative Mode that lets you forego the survival aspects in favor of unfettered construction, and the combination of blueprints and free building opens up new possibilities, allowing you to use cool pre-builds as a starting point for your own ideas.
It's great to have both the option to let creativity flow and the ability to make excellent settlements without much trouble, but Lego Fortnite is also somewhat thin in the building department. In addition to the pieces you need for structures, you can also cobble together special foundations, wheels, and balloons to make vehicles, which are pretty instantly hilarious. The system offers the same goofy building freedom that made The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom so much fun to mess around in – or it might in the future, when there's more to it. You can fashion land vehicles and hot air balloons with rocket thrusters, but there are only a few pieces dedicated to the endeavor, and no real means of controlling or steering what you create. While players are already finding a few creative workarounds for that problem, the system is disappointing as it stands. It's a way Lego Fortnite could further separate itself from other survival games, but leaves you waiting for Epic to flesh it out.
