So as someone who has dumped more hours into Fortnite in the last year and a half than I'd like to admit I have, in fact, been playing some LEGO Fortnite, which I still keep accidentally calling "LEGO Minecraft"
Like the other two new modes (a Rocket League-themed racing mode by Psyonix and a stripped down revival of Rock Band by Harmonix), LEGO Fortnite doesn't QUITE feel fleshed out enough to be its own game in its current state, but as a free alternate mode in a game I already play regularly with my friends, it's impressive. It looks nice, the combat's simple but feels good enough, and as a fan of Animal Crossing and Dragon Quest Builders I really like the focus on building up villages for your NPCs. It also seems like there's a lot of potential for building vehicles due to the fact that you can make structures that move, which seems like the big thing that could set it apart from Minecraft in the long run (even if it is very likely just another thing taken from Zelda, like the food-based buff system that can give you bonus hearts and temporary resistance to extreme temperatures). But I haven't really messed with that yet
That being said, there are a lot of obvious pain points right now, and I wouldn't be surprised if I lost interest after a few weeks and just waited for the next major content update because of them
- Sleeping in beds doesn't skip nighttime. This was especially annoying during the first night when it started raining and we were just freezing to death unless we stood next to our campfire
- Inventory management is a MASSIVE pain in the ass, to the point that it feels like half of my playtime is spent just sorting shit out. Your inventory isn't very big and doesn't seem to be expandable, items can only be sorted into stacks of 30 unlike Minecraft's 64, and the basic chests only have TEN item slots??? You can make bigger chests, but they require scarce materials that would usually be better used elsewhere. And I haven't found any way to label chests, either with a sign or an item frame or anything like that, so I'm just constantly looking back and forth between these tiny 10-slot chests trying to remember what we put where
- And while on the subject of item management, I'm not sure if there's a good way to dispose of unwanted items? Your inventory will constantly fill up with nearly-broken wooden tools and weapons dropped by enemies, and if you drop them from your inventory they just seem to stay on the ground forever
- The other half of my playtime right now feels like it's spent just running from point A to point B, either traveling from the main village to the biome we currently need to explore or just running to retrieve my backpack after I die, because we haven't figured out any good options for transportation yet. People are making custom vehicle-adjacent contraptions a la Tears of the Kingdom, which is very cool, but there aren't, like... basic mine carts and tracks? For some reason? Or mounts, or teleporters, or anything else that would make travel faster. There ARE gliders, at least, but we haven't quite made those yet, and you have to make a decent amount of progress to unlock them.
- The world generation seems... boring? Minecraft is very good at giving you varied terrain and interesting landmarks that make your world feel unique. It's exciting to start a new world and see a really cool mountain or a particularly scenic forest that seems like the perfect spot for your new home! But every world in LEGO Fortnite just kinda looks the same, with only minor differences. Everyone's always gonna start out on similar rolling hills in the grasslands biome with a desert within walking distance and a big, icy mountain on the horizon, because the game's rigid progression revolves around advancing through those three biomes. Even if those biomes always have to be there, it doesn't feel like we've found any particularly interesting features within them on our world yet
- Maybe this is just me, but I just don't have as much fun with survival/crafting/building games where you can't deform the terrain. It's just so easy to clear out some pesky dirt blocks in Minecraft if you need to make room for a build. In LEGO Fortnite, building on uneven terrain means having to build atop a huge foundation that sticks out of the ground. And cave exploration is more tedious when you can't dig your own shortcuts.
- Also a me thing: The focus on prefab building elements, and even entire building blueprints, does help streamline building a lot, letting you make an aesthetically pleasing village really easily. But for me, it sparks my imagination a lot less than Minecraft's set of general purpose one-meter blocks. I currently don't see much reason to fiddle with building my own creations with the slightly clunky third person building controls when the prefab buildings all get the job done. This feels wrong for a LEGO game
Now, obviously, this is a game that just came out, and I'm comparing it to THE survival crafting sandbox game that's been getting updates for almost 15 years. I'm hopeful that they'll work on some of these things. But it's so easy to find people online going "omg this is the MINECRAFT KILLER!! look at how fully featured this is, Minecraft is COOKED," which just feels extremely silly to me because of LEGO Fortnite's obvious limitations
I think people have just developed a really weird relationship with Minecraft and Mojang because they've dumped thousands of hours into it. They want Mojang to keep piling on new things to do and see forever so that they never get bored, even if piling on a million new systems and items and biomes and mobs and whatnot might not necessarily make for a better game in the long run. People act like it is literally a moral obligation of Mojang's to patch as much new content as possible into Minecraft every year, to the point that I think people have forgotten just how damn good Minecraft is as a game. So I'm curious to see where people land on LEGO Fortnite, once the novelty wears off and once its biggest stans stop replying to any complaints with "shut up it just came out and it's free"