The LEGO Group and Gameloft launch ‘Heartlake Friendship Zone’
After a long string of mobile games, the LEGO Group and Gameloft have collaborated once again, this time on a virtual Heartlake city from LEGO Friends.
The LEGO Group is on a brave mission to teach children about friendship while promoting online safety (and selling toys) – all through a Friends desktop game. The game is billed as a ‘kid-safe virtual experience’ and most importantly, you can play it for free right now.
Simply going to heartlakefriendshipzone.com immediately loads you into the ‘experience’. Kids can make an avatar using a few LEGO Friends heads, bodies, and hair pieces, and can change their skin tone. You can select a generic username using a colour and an animal. We were “Green Monkey.”
There are only a few actual minigames in the experience – the dress-up avatar at the beginning and the Tiny Wings style skateboarding game are probably the best. The main map is made up of a few interactable structures (that most lead to empty rooms) and a video screen right in the middle of Heartlake that plays an ad for the LEGO Friends TV series.
The Friendship Zone seems designed to give kids the feeling of playing a massively multiplayer online game (or MMORPG) without any actual online multiplayer. Most of the gameplay involves interacting with the computer-controlled LEGO Friends characters, walking back and forth between them as you give an item from one to another.
A few other characters wander around the Heartlake map, seemingly only as a visual touch. At one point, though, Zac takes you into Autumn’s house. He claims that this is the most popular hangout spot, which is proven by the presence of a few other characters with colour/animal names above their heads.
This is where you’re introduced to the dialogue options, which are mostly variations of ‘hi’, ‘bye’, or ‘cool!’ These may have indeed been other real people we were interacting with, but they were never present anywhere else and never said anything other than ‘bye’. So, who’s to say?
In the game’s launch announcement, focus is given to “how kids have adapted to playing and making friends online,” with ‘Heartlake Friendship Zone’ offering parents reassurance that their kids are doing so in a completely safe environment. It succeeds in that, since there seems to be no chance your kids will be interacting with anyone other than Zac and Nova from LEGO Friends.
If you can bear the same 20 second loop of main menu pop for a while, check out the Heartlake Friendship Zone. Or maybe cut out the middleman and just go buy some LEGO Friends sets.
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