This game might sound cheesy for some people at first glance. "I mean gee, a game where you play with legos online? What is this, people never heard of how bad Roblox turned out to be?!" (Personally I like games where you build stuff very fun, that's why I bought Blockland years ago in the first place...)

Oh trust me, it's a lot more than that. This game is like a fusion between Garry's Mod and Legos, but FAR easier to play. You can do pretty much anything in a stylized block world - houses, cities, deathmatches, survival games, racing tracks - and a lot more with its intuitive building and eventing system. Eventing is a sort of very very easy "scripting" within Blockland that you can use to make certain blocks to do certain things from within pre-set lists of actions that you can do to the block for it to do something you want and a lot more. It might seem very overwhelming at first, but when you start playing with it you'll get used to the idea quickly.

Building, in my opinion, is a little bit trickier, as you have to move "ghost blocks" around with the numpad (or some other buttons if you're on a numpad-less laptop) and then press enter to deploy a block, and they cannot be floating, nor penetrating the ground or other blocks, unless they are to be built within a Zone Brick which allows you to make actually floating blocks inside of it, so you don't have to make invisible supports for every floating island you might want to do. Buiilding is also very well optimized as you can do a number of moves with the ghost bricks to get them where you want and how you want quickly and efficiently; there exists a macro system where you can "save" the moves you do to a block so you can replicate patterns like stairs and stuff like that without much of a hassle. However, building can be clunky as you have to take blocks from a list to put them in your block selection list - you can only carry up to 10 blocks at a time, I believe.

However don't let this limit your creativity, as you can do pretty superb buildings in this game as evidenced by the game's great community - there is lots of support for this game, the developers and its players won't hesitate to help you with any problems you might have with the product, and there are just a LOT of addons in this game that do not allow it to ever be boring, especially with the Return to Blockland addon which is basically a community hub for the game, complete with a chat room, news, and a ton of other addons that are mounted into RTB for easy access, deactivation and (un)installation. RTB can also be downloaded for your server so you can get new Administration features, get the addons of your server listed in the server browser, so the players don't have to download it directly from your server (given they're hosted in RTB), and a few more features.

Making addons for this game is, from what I understand, not tremendously difficult, and as long as you have the talent and willpower to make that one brick you can't find but need, or to make that weapon of your dreams, have a Ferrari in your garage or just a simple addition like a new face for your Blockhead, or maybe a song you want your Music Brick to play, all in all there is no (?) limit to the addons you can make for the game. I wish I could write from experience, but unfortunately, apart from a song or two I didn't make any addons for this game.

What I WAS ABLE TO do however was host servers and oh boy, coming from a person who can't ever host servers because of his connection not ever letting people connect, this was a HUGE plus for me. Even the player with the most blocked-off router can host games for their friends and never be hindered by issues like tremendous lag or timeouts, in my experience I found the netcode of Blockland to be very good. At least... I think this is the netcode's doing.

The gameplay is very appealing and so are the graphics, as they are very beautiful and, unsurprisingly, very colourful, stylized to look like a cartoon, similar to the likes of TF2, except on legos. Yeah. Graphics for me are very hard to describe. The "maps" (or just... plains) are roughly customizable so they have bodies of water or different types of surfaces, which can spice up the game a bit - I've always liked to build in maps with lots of water.

Overall, the game is very enjoyable and on the right servers it can be a ludicrous amount of fun. It is really amazing how such a simple and cheap game like this can provide so many hours of entertainment, from messing around with a few people to doing giant, elaborate buildings, from having mindless fast-paced deathmatch to having class-based capture the flag matches on carefully structured builds and just so much more. Blockland is truly a game for the ages, despite a few flaws like clunky building and some instances of lag when there are too many bricks within a server or when they're being duplicated.

I have this game since V12 and now it's on what, Vtwenty-something or so, and from there and now I still recommend it to everybody, kids to adults. The only thing I DIDN'T like is how they got rid of maps in an update months back. Back then you had maps like Bedroom and Kitchen, that were... well, semi-realistic bedrooms and kitchens. I REALLY liked those! But hey, they needed to take a radical action to let the game evolute and that was the end result I suppose...

TL;DR: This game is great! Totally recommended! A bit clunky to get started, but you'll get used to it! Lots of addons to help you, client-side and server-side! The graphics are also beautiful!

I've probably put over 1500 hours into this before it came to steam.
This is one of the best games I have ever played. It's limitlessly open, with a great mature (edit 4 months later: kind of mature, it's a lego game, of course it'll attract kids.) community, and there's just so much to experience, from dogfights, to city RPGs, to gangster shootouts, to go-kart races, to who-knows-what! There's thousands upon thousands of addons (plugins/mods) for the game that are extremely easy to install and the game is still going strong since it's initial build in 2004!
Buy this game!
It even just permanently dropped it's price from $20 to $10
Buy it!
Buy it now!

The vanilla game may not have a ton to offer, so it all comes down to what the community has to offer (which is a ton). The gameplay makes it a lot like Gmod, except with a more consistant style. Additionally, it's multiplayer architecture makes joining servers with custom content seamless. You'll literally never need to actually install an add-on to play on a server with custom content (with a few exceptions, servers using custom GUI's may want you to install their GUI mods in order to play. This is usually optional anyways.) It's a game you'll just keep coming back to.

Blockland is my favorite game, and is has been since 2008. The community is creative, and there's hundreds of servers to explore 24/7. Building is a joy, TDMs are responsive, quick, and fun, and exploring other people's servers will keep you entertained for a lifetime. I certainly recommend this game, and so does pretty much everyone I know that has it.

--PLEASE READ ALL COMMENTS BELOW--

Edit of April 1st: If you manage to read this entire review and the comments included and you're still not convinced as to why you shouldn't purchase Blockland, please visit this sub-reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/BlocklandIsHorrible/

(The name was originally a joke, ignore it)

This sub-reddit contains many rants that were censored by Badspot and his supporters on the original Blockland sub-reddit. It's a bit messy because we have many users complaining, so I take no responsibility if you are offended when reading the content on this sub-reddit.

Edit of March 22nd: Someone has made a claim that Badspot has attempted to hire them to gather my personal information -- like home address, work place if applicable, and other things. He also claims that he would have gotten this information through sending me viruses. I worry about the reasoning behind his desire for my personal information.

Given that this kind of activity is illegal, I have sent Badspot an email regarding this situation and am currently awaiting his response and see whether or not he denies the accusations. Since the "hacker" gave me the information, I have nothing against him and don't plan to take any action against him. I am posting this update because he is ignoring my emails, making him even more suspicious.

Edit of March 11th, in response to the developer's desperate attempt at defending himself after making himself look like a clown:

Before judging me as a person, please read how the users of Blockland reacted to a disliked user's house being burned down and his cat being killed: http://forum.blockland.us/index.php?topic=181239.0

Please ignore the developer's response for now. If you want to know why he is resorting to such low tactics to defend himself, I insist that you read all of the comments below on all pages. I will address the developer's response directly from the comments in order to save space on this review and to prevent people from reading my life story when the review is about Blockland.

Edit of March 6th, in response to the developer editing his response in effort to work around his original comment's deletion which was intended to harass me:

Eric Hartman (Badspot), has a history of being childish in the way he handles things. He has let children upset him to the point of exposing their personal information and families' information over the internet in an effort to have his community harass them in his defense.

While there is only one case that I know of where this has occurred, it is unacceptable and is a violation of that person's privacy rights. Badspot revealed the payment names and email addresses of this user which, I'm pretty sure, is against the law.

Here is the "Drama Dossier" on a user who has made the mistake of upsetting Badspot: http://badspot.us/Zac-Conover.html

ALL of his communication data which was collected by Badspot through SECURE PAYMENTS and was trusted to him, a man selling his product. How can you explain that? You give a man selling a legitimate product your money and he exposes the information you used on his website because you angered him. Does that sound professional to you? I think not.

The question you should be asking yourselves is: Do you want to end up like this guy? If you bother Badspot enough, he'll do the same to you. I have hardly done anything worth being called out for because this man has ignored my existence until the very moment I called him out on the one place he still has a chance to milk money from users with a game he doesn't even take care of.

-Edit of February 25th, removed for updated data-

---- Original Review ----

I'll be the first to write a somewhat negative review about this game:

First: I started playing this game around 2006-07, prior to Retail Blockland's (the current game) release. This game is almost entirely community-based. This game is what you want to make it, which means the community needs responsible, creative users to help form a fun game for everyone.

This has been a problem since the recent removal of maps, which were an easy way to play the game without putting too much effort into it. Currently, the game has a lack of creative players which have caused many, many players to quit the game due to the lack of content from the developer (which he removed maps with a promise of more content, which never came, even a year later), and the lack of decent servers to play on.

However, Blockland has always had the problem of a small community which has made decent servers scarce. The lack of maps has left mapmakers without their ability to contribute to Blockland, causing them to leave along with many other players who enjoyed playing on maps rather than the default (and now, the only) map, "Slate".

I'm not going to lie. I, and many others have felt that the game has been dead (or dying) for a long time now. Even when maps were still here, the game was dying slowly, but surely -- the removal of the maps just kickstarted it because nobody knew how to cope with the lack of creative builders to replace the position that maps once held.

Steam, for some of us, is believed to be the last resort for Blockland's future. It's up to you, the newest purchaser who is reading this review, to help reform the community into something better, more active, and more stable.

Another problem is that since the maps were removed, many players with low-spec computers were forced to quit due to being unable to process the amount of bricks it would take to create a "map".

So, if you've got a low-spec PC, I would not recommend this game to you until you get a computer with a decent processor and graphics card. Otherwise, you'll be playing with a constant lag that will drive you to hate the game.

The shaders are poorly optimized. (And I mean, they are *extremely* poorly optimized.) So the majority of the Blockland community don't even play with the shaders that we sacrificed our maps for because they can't even run them. Not even high-spec computers can run the shaders with a large amount of bricks unless you've got a ridiculously powerful computer. I've got a quad-core i5 processor and an AMD 7870 Graphics card, 2GB video memory, and I can run Battlefield 3 on max settings with over 60FPS, whereas I have trouble running shaders on max in Blockland and end up only getting around 28-30FPS with builds that are around 50k bricks or more.

The gameplay is good as long as you play on a decent server, it depends on your tastes.

I'm also going to warn anyone who buys this game: Prepare to be flamed, trolled, or annoyed by the community at some point. The game has one of the most merciless, rude, arrogant communities I have ever been a part of. However, that's not the majority of the community. A lot of the community is very nice and like to take part with each other in building projects or film-making and such. But if you ask me, the community needs an increase in better players.

To conclude, we have a lack of a decent, creative playerbase right now and we need more players with more creativity and will to step forward and create something awesome out of this game. Everything in the trailer IS possible, but most of it has never happened and will never happen unless we have more creative players. The trailer was highly exaggerated and the game is far more boring than that. But like I said, everything in the trailer is possible, but it hasn't happened -- yet.

So, if you're willing to be a good player and you want to help revive an almost-dead game and form it into a better game for everyone's enjoyment, buy the game. If you don't want to work with the community, hate playing games that take time and effort to make something good out of it, or just generally dislike overhyped games, don't buy it. Even though the game is overexaggerated, it doesn't mean we can't work together to make it that awesome.

It's up to you.