Most of the time, Fortnite collaborations consist of cosmetics or the occasional in-game event. This time around, LEGO Fortnite is practically its own game, offering a survival-focused title that is free-to-play when it could’ve easily been a full-priced standalone and best of all? LEGO Fortnite gives PS5 players a taste of the Valheim experience.
It’s obviously not good enough for Fortnite to only be one of the best battle royale games, but since the release of the Creative mode, and now the introduction of LEGO Fortnite, it seems Epic Games is aiming for a spot on our best survival games list too, offering a fully-fledged survival experience.
Following the end of Fortnite’s short-lived OG Season, which was a nostalgia trip for veteran fans of the game, Fortnite delivered a live event called ‘The Big Bang’, and while it only lasted roughly 11 minutes, we got to see the future of Fortnite, with the game becoming a pseudo-hub for new standalone titles, the first three being LEGO Fortnite, Rocket Racing, and Fortnite Festival.
While Rocket Racing and Fortnite Festival are set to be released in the coming days, LEGO Fortnite was released on December 7 to a huge influx of players, with over a million people playing in its first couple of hours live. But the most surprising thing is that LEGO Fortnite feels like it took a child-friendly approach to Iron Gate Studio’s Valheim, which is currently an Xbox exclusive, and one of the best Xbox Game Pass games.
Similar to Valheim, LEGO Fortnite players create (or join) procedurally-generated worlds, where players must not only find resources but survive against hostile creatures and the changing weather. Hunger also plays an important role in surviving, with actions like sprinting or harvesting knocking down your hunger meter.
Unlike Valheim’s somewhat dark plot set in the Norse afterlife of Valhalla, LEGO Fortnite takes you into the LEGO universe with the goal of managing villages that you can create and customize. There are various parts you can use to build your own personalized houses, but there are also blueprints that can make creating homes and outposts much easier.
As you adventure across your new world in this new LEGO game, you’ll uncover more of the map, another feature found in Valheim. New villagers will give you small hints as to where to go next, giving you somewhat of a story to experience. If it’s anything like the normal Fortnite too, we expect this LEGO version to receive content updates in the future to expand on what is already a refreshing survival game.
While many of you PS5 players are likely waiting for Valheim to join the ever-growing library of the best PS5 games, if you want something similar, LEGO Fortnite is undoubtedly the best way to experience it. Not only is it free-to-play alongside Fortnite itself, but for those of you who do play the battle royale title, many of your existing cosmetics will convert into loveable Minifigures.
From our short time with the game so far, LEGO Fortnite is a surprisingly beautiful and extremely creative reinvention of the Fortnite brand – so much so that it could truly be its own game, and a full-priced one at that. It makes sense that Epic Games is likely waiting to see the success of the experience for now, but we wouldn’t be surprised if the company decided to publish LEGO Fortnite as its own game, removing the requirement to download Fortnite’s standard game modes altogether.
And, compared to Valheim’s brutal nature, LEGO Fortnite is much more approachable. The LEGO brand is loved worldwide by kids, teenagers, and adults alike, and while Valheim is extremely popular to this day, the appeal of LEGO could make LEGO Fortnite another huge success for Epic Games. While we’ll need to wait and see if this new game has a consistent fanbase, we expect it to remain fairly popular.
If you’re a Fortnite player anyway, you may want to take a look at the upcoming Fortnite Festival song list, which features some incredible tracks from artists like The Weeknd, Billie Eilish, and more. And if you find that you don’t like LEGO Fortnite, our list of the best PS5 survival games features plenty of brilliant and unique titles to enjoy.