Lego Fortnite

Epic Games and LEGO partnered to create a new Fortnite cooperative crafting mode called LEGO Fortnite. Downloadable through the Fortnite launcher, LEGO promises to offer a secure environment for kids to express their creativity.

Fortnite is no stranger to crossovers, but this extends beyond adding new skins. LEGO Fortnite allows up to eight players to build and explore procedurally generated worlds. In Survival Worlds, players can team up to gather resources and battle enemies ranging from wolves to pirates. These play the most like a typical crafting survival game, with players gathering resources to craft tools and buildings.

As players build and create, they will unlock new blueprints for bigger and better things. Meanwhile, Sandbox Worlds gives players an endless supply of LEGO Bricks to make whatever they want.

LEGO stresses a commitment to child safety

LEGO described its commitment to safety in a Parent’s Guide on the company website. Fortnite introduced age ratings to islands in November, which also apply to LEGO Fortnite islands. Epic’s parental controls also allow parents to control their children’s experiences. These include setting voice and text chat permissions, purchase settings, and requiring parents to input a PIN when their child receives a friend request. Players under 13 or below their country’s age of digital consent will need parental consent to access certain features.

These safety features are not new or unique to the LEGO Fortnite mode. However, it is understandable that LEGO wanted to lay out its comment on child safety. While Fortnite is incredibly popular with preteens, a majority of players are in the 18 to 24 range. While LEGO is not exclusively for children, it’s essential to exercise caution in any online space where kids and adults interact.

‘LEGO Fortnite’ Launches With Signature Block Characters and Survival Gameplay

In LEGO Fortnite, players can explore a vast map (which Epic says is 19 times the size of Fortnite’s battle royale island) as classic characters including Brite Bomber, Cuddle Team Leader and Raven — but in a new LEGO form. Players will be tasked with collecting food, resources and craft items in order to prepare for battle against enemies, in solo matches or alongside friends.

With craft items, players will be able to build customizable defense shelters, where they can recruit villagers to collect materials for nighttime survival. To secure rare resources, players will need to gear up and explore deep caves, where there are also a number of hidden areas on the map.

“There was a natural opportunity here,” Adam Sussman, president of Epic Games, told Hypebeast. “The LEGO brand is an expert in physical play. Epic Games is an expert in digital play. We were able to join forces and create something that leveraged our strengths and the power of our technology to really build on the idea of bringing creative play to the world.”

LEGO Fortnite is only just getting started, and Epic has plans to update the title with new world-building features, gameplay options and LEGO Style outfits in early 2024. Fortnite is available to play for free on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch and on PC.

Lego Fortnite is way bigger than we thought, and millions of people are playing the new survival mode

Fortnite is constantly doing crossovers, so the announcement that Epic had teamed up with Lego for a new survival mode glanced off my consciousness like the announcement of a new line of Funko Pops. But we just tried the mode, which has already attracted over two million concurrent players after launching today, and it’s way bigger and more fun than we anticipated—and, of course, free.

Survival games of this type are plentiful: It’s roughly the Minecraft setup, though without voxel digging. You punch trees, get wood, build crafting stations, make tools, build better things. At night, spiders and skeletons and other monsters attack. But rarely are new survival games this refined at launch.

We’ve got quibbles, like that you can’t eat food directly from the inventory menu and creating even building surfaces is a challenge, but it’s intuitive and satisfying to run around beating up trees and building shacks so far. Combat is simple sword-and-board action with a block and dodge, but it’s fluid and responsive. Rocks have a nice crackle when you smack ’em with a pickaxe, and Fortnite’s impressive Unreal 5-powered lighting looks just as great when the sun is setting on plastic bricks.

I especially enjoyed the discovery that you can pick up giant boulders and hurl them around, inadvertently or intentionally knocking over your structures. It’s not Breath of the Wild level physics sandbox play, but our first impression is that there’s a lot more here than just a novelty mode that’ll be fun for a day.

Having only just started the game—and it does seem proper to refer to it as a game, not just a mode—we don’t know how deep the tech tree goes, or how big the generated worlds are. Checking in on Twitch, though, we’re seeing streamers in biomes we haven’t discovered yet, and they have better loot, too: shields, crossbows, and food that grants Zelda-like elemental resistances. We’ve found little surprises of our own; at one point Morgan wandered off in the direction of a rainbow fairy and was led to a treasure chest.

One surprising detail of Lego Fortnite you’ll encounter upfront is how robust and generous its server system is. You can spin up a server in seconds and invite friends to your world. By default, worlds aren’t persistent. Friends are considered “visitors” that can craft and build alongside you, but will leave the server if the hosts leaves and drop everything in their inventory. A world can become persistent if the world owner gives a friend a “world key.” Players with keys to a world can play on it even if the owner is offline. The owner can hand out up to seven keys, with a maximum of eight players possible on a server at once.

It’s similar to how Mojang handles its official Realms servers in Minecraft, but what’s wild is that Fortnite is letting millions of players set up persistent worlds completely for free. That instantly makes Lego Fortnite one of the most accommodating and accessible survival games around.

If you’re not a Fortnite player already, you can play Lego Fortnite by installing Fortnite on the Epic Games Store and then selecting Lego Fortnite from the main menu. One note: As a newcomer, you might wonder how to customize your character so that you don’t appear as whatever default you’re assigned. Fortnite’s kind of weird: your character’s appearance is defined by their outfit, so unless you have one that works in the Lego mode (there are apparently over 1,000 that do at launch), you’ll either have to accept the character it gives you or buy some V-bucks and pick up a new outfit.

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