LEGO Voyagers

Written by Jeremy Duff on 9/26/2025 for PS5  

This year has been a huge year for cooperative gaming. Co-op games have been a prominent feature in this year’s releases, from the stellar Split Fiction that started off the year to the emergence of the “friend slop” genre, it is suddenly cool to play with your friends again. That trend continues with another game focused on teaming up with your closest buddy and heading off on an adventure in a world you’ve likely created time and time again in your childhood: LEGO Voyagers.

The first thing that you need to know is that this is a co-op only game; this means that you cannot play the game without a second player joining you. There is no option to have a computer-controlled partner, you will need a second person to play this game. This can be either in-person or online. Thankfully, the dev team has elected to include a Friend’s Pass option, which lets another user download a version of the game locally that can connect to your session for online co-op play (without the need to purchase).

Once you have found your partner, you are going to step into the shoes of single, one-block LEGO bits. Those are the small, one-by-one pieces that you have likely lost time and time again in your childhood with real LEGO sets. Don’t let the size fool you as these little guys might be tiny in stature, but they’re big on imagination. They long to see the stars, literally, as both dream to blast off into space along with the larger LEGO sets, they see in the distance frequently doing.

Following the most recent mission launched for space, which ends in tragedy shortly after takeoff and scatters LEGO bits all over your world, these two little blocks set off to make their dreams come true. What transpires is their trek along a world built out of LEGO bricks and filled with traps and obstacles to stand in their way. It is with their…err, your…understanding of the world of LEGO that they will overcome their challenges and reach their goal.

It is a very simple and playful concept that looks fantastic in motion. This is a world built of LEGO elements, from the ground they walk along to the structures they explore, and the creatures they will encounter. You could literally recreate it all with a bucket full of the little blocks. This is the charm of Voyagers as it is truly a LEGO world that has been brought to life. I’m not talking about in the same way as the various Marvel or Jurassic Park LEGO adventures have, or even the Ninjago and LEGO Movie games. There is no need to stretch your imagination—it looks like a real LEGO creation from top to bottom.

With that comes a relatively simplistic gameplay design. Your blocks can be fastened to other blocks and drag them around and even attach them to other blocks. You will move them, twist and turn them into position, and let physics take over to move from your humble little block-home to your finishing goal.

Despite the simple nature of the controls, they aren’t really spelled out too clearly for you as the tale begins. Your buttons allow you to connect, rotate, and flip the pieces you encounter, but it never truly tells you that. Sure, they give you some pseudo-tutorial scenarios early on, but to keep you engulfed in the LEGO world, they don’t come with any true text explanation or detail. That was something that we found extremely annoying. It is really by trial and error that you figure out what does what, which is a bit of a pain.

A little more explanation would have worked wonders for me and my daughter when we set off. Without, it took us a while to understand that we could lock ourselves to a certain track to manipulate the positioning of the pieces or help us focus on a small target we needed to grab onto. Eventually, it sort of just clicked for us, but it wasn’t without an unnecessary dose of frustration early on.

Once you figure out just how and what you can interact with in this world, then it becomes smooth sailing. Nearly everything, in terms of puzzles, is physics-based; that means you must extend bridges to reach further goals, load seesaws with different weight amounts on each side to get you higher and hold open switches and doors for each other. There is even a healthy dose of launching each other off catapults, which is something that we always enjoy. The concepts are simple and really work well to make this seem like a real LEGO adventure; these are the things we would have built with our own blocks if we were acting out this tale with our own toys.

It takes a little while for the game to hit this groove, but when it does it is cooperative bliss, and then it ends. Yep, it ends. The adventure is extremely short and just when the game hits its stride, you will run right into the end. To call this disappointing is an understatement. With our frustrations to fully understand the controls and mechanics taking up a good third of the time we spent, the end result leaves you feeling a bit empty. It only took us a little over four hours to complete the adventure, and we were left craving more. Things were finally making sense, and we were ready to be tested in this world by working as a team, but that never happened.

While having a game leave you wanting more isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it is when you didn’t get enough of it in the first place. The joy here is meant to be in the journey, from how visually stunning the lands in Voyagers can be (in terms of them actually looking like LEGO set pieces) to the comforting, mood music that feels as though it is as natural as the air you breathe. It all fits together perfectly.

You’re meant to take in the scenes and world and truly feel what it would be like a small piece lost in this world of wonder; but you end up just getting a hint of that feeling because it is gone as soon as it really starts. Nothing you experience is going to break ground for co-op gaming, but it is going to give you a glimpse of what this development team and this idea is capable of. I’ll be honest, I am not 100% sure how I feel about that. As a result, this experience ends up feeling incomplete in the end.

 

There are an excellent concept and framework for what could be an amazing adventure. Instead of realizing what could actually be, we end up with something like a proof of concept. There is love and appreciation visible in this development team's work, but it just doesn’t spend enough time on the stove to provide you with a good gaming meal. Hopefully there are plans to expand on what has been created here and flesh it out to a full, fulfilling adventure, either with future titles or additional content. As it stands now, there just isn’t enough to really satisfy the cravings that it generates.