During his time at E3 2016, Zach managed to get a hands-on preview of LEGO Worlds, the open world contender for Minecraft’s crown that’s currently in Early Access on Steam.

The demo featured was basically the same content that is available on Steam, dropping players into a procedurally generated world comprised entirely of LEGO; featuring multiple islands to explore, each with their own unique theme based upon classic LEGO sets. Players can discover vehicles to commandeer, animals to capture and ride and a variety of enemies to engage in traditional LEGO-style combat.

As you’d expect from a game so firmly entrenched in the LEGO universe, almost everything that you discover can be taken apart and reassembled into a new creation. For example, if you defeat a skeleton and then a pirate, you can take parts from each of your foes and craft an undead pirate… Here’s hoping that the game also features vampires so that we can finally make ourselves a vampirate.

Multiplayer was a new feature that launched just prior to the show and this played out similar to MMO’s in that Zach would stumble across over players also exploring the same world as he was but, with no way to communicate with each other, the ability to coordinate and take on building tasks together was unfortunately not possible.

Overall, LEGO Worlds shows great potential but is still lacking in enough unique features or content for us to tell whether or not it’ll be viable competition for Minecraft and other world building games. The central concept is fun to play around with and there’s quite a bit of depth to the building elements but, aside from mucking about and coming up with new combinations, there really isn’t all that much to do just yet.

Nonetheless, both fans of LEGO and open world crafting games should definitely keep an eye on LEGO Worlds as it continues development, as there could be something really special brewing here.