LEGO Universe is a spectacular game , to call it a spectacular MMO on the other hand may be giving it too much credit. I never really reviewed it because it is an MMO in nature, and these games change over time. In fact, most of my complaints about the game in it’s initial form have been remedied over the content released this past year.

Getting down to specifics: I paid 40 bucks for my copy as a founder, which included a free month of gameplay. The game costs roughly $10.00 USD per month to play. You can CLICK HERE to get the game itself for free after setting up a LEGO® ID(also free), and access a good portion of what the game has to offer without paying anything. If after you’ve gotten your faction gear and played for a while, and can put up with the hundreds of mini-quests that give the game most of it’s structure, then I would recommend paying for a month of play at the beginning of December. You will get the final month of January for free with your paid month of December, meaning you’re paying 10 dollars to play this game for two months, or five bucks a month. Most people trade in their games for at least 20 dollars less than they paid for them. In short, 10 dollars for a 50 dollar value (the last free month for paying players bumping the value up to 50), that many of you would have bought for 50 and sold for 30 two weeks later, if you can compare this to a standard console game. You could buy a subscription for the remainder of November too, if you don’t mind spending 20 dollars total for what is left of it and December to get the third free month.

Now I said the game may not be the best MMO. Elaborating on that, it’s because much of the game I spent playing solo, despite a few hundred other people running around. There are points in the game where it pays to co-ordinate, but nothing that typically required more than four people, and I do believe that all the instances (most of the world is progressive, with quick-builds and enemies respawning quickly) only allowed for four players anyway. If I had been in charge of the game, I wouldn’t simply take LEGO Universe down for good, I would take the MMO part out of the game, patch the PC version with local save data and matchmaking/LAN after removing the online servers, release it on game consoles, and sell periodic content updates like new job classes, missions, and gear as DLC packs.

What I’m getting at is that I think this should have been released as a console game, and even my friends who are not AFOLs (adult fans of LEGO) bought and enjoyed games like LEGO Batman, LEGO Indiana Jones, and especially the LEGO Star Wars titles, while I myself completely ignored them. Those tittles were all themed after another franchise, a parody of it’s source material in the style of a LEGO product. LEGO Universe is at it’s core an all LEGO product, not “LEGO version of something else”, and it comes together very well, despite some of it’s aggravating faults. Take some time to play it while you still can, and don’t let these two-plus hours I spent preparing this article instead of playing Starcraft2 be in vain! Yessssss, my little Zerglits, we shall conquer our foes soon now.