After the preview session, during which I could play Lego Voyagers in the first half hour, a must-have player, what a co-love-hazelight-aa-ge-game adventure with Light Bryk Studios programmers and Arthouse Publisher Annapurna Interactive.
Keyword: power.
There was one less than the perfect thing between my initial preview and my 14-year-old daughter, and I filled the full version of LEGO Voyagers-where we fell, built and played for final loans in the cooperative on this screen: it ended too quickly. Although we liked it all the way – it made him disappointingly unfulfilled, because it ended as it seemed to hit.
Short but sweet
You see, we threw loans after only three and a half hours – even less than slim five hours, which the publisher told us to expect. I’ve never been one to knock on the game only too compact. Heck, in the middle of Playdead is probably the best game I have ever reviewed in Ign, and like Lego Voyagers, it is without a dialogue an adventure that ended in less than four hours.
But while inside I left my jaw on the floor of surprise in the amazing masterpiece that I just experienced, Lego Voyagers left both my jaw and my daughter on the floor for a completely different reason: we both said: “Wait, that’s all?” To be candid, it is a game worth USD 25 and not everything has to be Sylksong. But they left it both wanted more in “No, we really thought there would be something more.”
I pull this problem to determine expectations, because apart from the self -voltage end of the campaign, I love almost everything else in Lego Voyagers. I will start with a tone, which differs from the more capricious licensed LEGO Tales and Slapstick-with heart. Instead, Voyagers are jokingly fascinating – delightfully – to who you play and how you move. You and your partner’s partner are simply nameless, voiceless bricks 1×1-one red and one blue, both with one, slightly expressive eyeball attached on one side-and you will just fall over the world of Lego with quite reliable physics jumping over you around the play spaces. And although of course it does not make a logical sense, you can jump by pressing A (on the Xbox controller) and fall into any nearby dowels from B. Pressing Y turns the orientation 90 degrees when you are in this Snap Button mode.
In fact, however, your avatars are not completely voiceless. Your 1×1 bricks can make charming compact noises if you press the X button, which can sometimes be used for harmonization in some places, but it is more likely to draw the attention of the cooperative partner during the online game. (In this note, recognition for Annapurna for following hazelight and offering a friend’s pass, which allows you to play with a friend online using only one copy of Voyagers.)
Our charming 1×1 bricks immediately form nice heroes in an almost Pixar-Iish way. I appreciate compact accents, such as blue, starts with a beach bucket on “head”. Music – which does not always play, but has an impact when he does – plays a gigantic role in establishing a fun atmosphere of Voyagers. It is delicate, but varied, humming in a way that is additional, not just forgotten noise. Most, if not everything, go to your “cold” or yoga playlist and not anywhere else, but it works here completely.
Bricks that shine
I also want to praise the original direction of art and visual identity of Voyagers, which is definitely less cartoon compared to licensed LEGO games. It applies to this kind of realism, and each piece in the world similar to diorama looks like shiny plastic, its real counterpart is-a marker with a word lego in every brick. Soft lighting during the day baked in many scenes has warmth and peace, which give it a relaxing, delicate and jokingly fascinating tone, and the operate of featherlight and shadow helped me pull in. The fact that these sets sometimes flow through them or surround them only, increases the credibility of these actually built LEGO sets that you observe in advance as an omniscient participant.
Studying this straightforward atmosphere is the total and complete lack of punishment for death; When – not, if – you fall from the edge of the stage or miss the jump and immerse from the side, it will immediately appear again where the last you were before the mistake. This is completely low rates and encourages soundproofing, so when you fall on your cooperative partner and you throw you out of the shelf or reject them from the bridge that you should hold to get over, they can’t be too enraged until you pull out the same trick.
There is never any direction, but we have intuitively understood that your goal in such a game is to get from point A to point B. In the early part of the campaign, which reached, simply collecting loose bricks from the stage and cooperating to assemble them in makeshift bridges to exceed the breaks. In the real spirit of Lego, there is no one proper way to build a path forward: you can build a super immaculate structure that construction engineer would accept, or collect with you a fire of pieces without respect for aesthetics or performance, but nevertheless performs the task. We had a tendency to the latter and we had a great time. (Additional note: photographic mode would be a nice addition as a way to capture digital memory of what you create and share with her friends and family – and a job file to solve all obstacles to you is really pleasant. But plain screenshots are enough.)
These puzzles develop a bit as the campaign progressed, although, as I mentioned, it seemed that there was much more space to grow, that it leaves unexplored. Our favorite scene made us lead us with a enormous dumping up in the industrial yard, where railway bags are formed. The locomotive in which we rode had to stop because of the gap in the tracks, so we got off, we jumped into the truck with one of us, while the second (effectively) worked on the pedals. We wandered, collecting raw materials to the truck bed before we took them to the foundry to be forged for useful songs, and then satisfyly caught a modern song and continued. It’s still plain, but with a few other steps than just installing a bridge or stairs.
We also had fun with a series of miniks at the end of the story, which I will not spoil here, except for noting that these are especially picky challenges based on physics, which can be quite challenging for younger players who will probably be attracted to Voyagers and its assessment of ESRB e-scale. Fortunately, none of these challenging tasks is required to develop – but we had a good time, gaining achievements that brought them.
Game time
Although puzzles make up the game meat, there are also some freedom in many scenes. My daughter and I raced ourselves first, which “jumps” every flower we came across, falling over it (and there are plenty of them throughout the campaign), even though there are no real prizes for it. There are also humorous “breaks” that you can take, for example, by everyone jumping on a gripper or sitting next to each other on a bench. They are absolutely not required, but they make humorous compact stops on the golden path (and another idea that those of us who played in divided fiction at the beginning of this year).
If I had to impose one more complaint against Lego Voyagers, it is not that neither my daughter nor I got completely, what should be meaning completely without a word. In the first moments of Avatary 1×1 they watch the rocket starting. They spend the next hours trying to get to the rockets … and I suppose you will see what will happen. But if it were moral in a story in a way that you can expect after watching a wall-e or a game such as a tunic, we both missed it.
