Road To Review: LEGO Dimensions

Lego is all about the mash-up. Though Lord Business from The Lego Movie might have been trying to rigidly preserve each and every Lego set in its original form, the truth is that once these toys are in people’s hands, they rarely live in isolation from one another. That was at the centre of the film’s story, and it’s also something that’s very much at the heart of Lego Dimensions.

Coming out of Traveller’s Tales, you know what to expect from the gameplay, with a lot of smashing, bashing and light puzzle solving, which is largely centred around the abilities of Wyldstyle, Batman and Gandalf, the story’s three main protagonists. However, it’s been expanded and adapted to reach out into the real world and interact with the Lego Toy Pad and whatever figures and toys you put on it, as Lego takes its first shot at the Toys to Life genre.

One thing that stands out is that there’s a constant back and forth between the game and the real world, so that you’ll be using Wyldstyle’s acrobatic skills to reach a higher ledge before then placing her on each of the three Toy Pad sections to engage her Master Builder ability with three piles of bricks. That might then create something that Batman can grapple onto and pull down, before Gandalf gets involved with a little magic.

Many of the puzzles centre around the Toy Pad in this way, and you’re regularly interacting with and moving toys around, to send them through colour coded vortexes to different parts of the map, remove them from an enemy’s clutches, and more. Though Batman, Gandalf and Wyldstyle will never be far from reach – the main game centres around their abilities – the Toy Pad supports up to seven characters, vehicles and gadgets all at once, from a huge catalogue. It can end up being quite overwhelming both in the real world and in the game, as a small army follows you around and you have to move lots of characters around.

I also found myself a little bit stumped on occasion when a new Toy Pad gameplay mechanic was introduced. Whereas hint boxes pop up next to interactive items that require a different character, I felt that some of the Toy Pad’s properties and the related puzzles weren’t explained well enough. The Chroma ability, for example, has you cover characters with paint in the game and then move the real world figures around the toy pad’s three sections, to trigger LEDs and match hints in the game world, but it had me scratching my head as to what I was doing wrong on more than one occasion. It gradually comes together and makes a lot more sense after a while, and starts to feel as familiar as the more traditional Lego puzzling.

The sting in the tail is the cost of these toys, just as it is across the Toys to Life genre. The starter pack is an eye-watering £79.99 at retail, though it does include everything that you really need in order to play the game from start to finish and feel thoroughly satisfied that you’ve seen practically everything the game has to offer. Of course, there’s plenty of replay value in trying to hunt down every golden brick, all the people in peril and so forth, but in this game, a the vast majority of the game hinges upon having more than what’s in the main box.

Further toys cost £14.99 for a minifigure and vehicle/gadget or £26.99 for level packs that add extra levels alongside a trio of appropriate figures – these worlds are visited within the main story, but level packs add another hour long adventure and hub world to feature the toys – and also team packs which have two minifigures and two vehicles/gadgets. It’s worth remembering that beyond the starter pack, this is pretty comparable to Skylanders and Disney Infinity. They also feel a little more optional for getting the most out of the game, thanks to overlapping abilities and focussing on unlocking the open world hubs and finding collectables, rather than sections of story levels.

The starter pack includes the LEGO Toy Pad, Batman, Wyldstyle, Gandalf and the Batmobile in the box, but perhaps the most gratifying aspect of all of this is that everything comes without having been assembled. The Toy Pad itself is just a grey slab with a few white sections for up to seven minifigures to go on, and though you do have an instruction booklet to build it before playing, putting together the various toys is all part of the game and the story.

A digital booklet pops up when you first need it, to give you step by step instructions on how to put together the Batmobile, while there’s regular additions and little alterations to the Toy Pad, which help to strengthen the ties between the game and the real world. The first time you put a Minifigure from a fun pack on the pad, the game will load up instructions for the accompanying vehicle or gadget, but in an odd quirk, you have to play through the included level of a level pack in order to get their instructions.

From the first half of the game, it seems as though not all worlds have TT Games on top form, and The Simpsons content just misses the mark, in my opinion. Though the level pack retells a classic story from the show and the main story level tries to play on various tropes from the show, it loses a lot of the charm of the family comedy and has Homer simply playing the loud mouthed fool throughout. It doesn’t help that The Simpsons Minifigs just look odd to start with.

Elsewhere, the adaptions and contortions that the various dimensions go through are fantastic, though. There’s a staggering array of well known actors reprising their roles from TV and film in this game, and there are plenty of small touches like The Lego Movie’s distinctively stiff character animation and plenty of knowing jokes. The Doctor Who level is an excellent romp as you fight through a variety of traditional and modern foes, which bodes well for its level pack in November, while the Portal 2 content is a sublime homage to Valve’s original games, and worlds collide in ever more spectacular ways as you get deeper into the story.

It’s all delivered with the traditional wit and charm of the Lego series, and the game as a whole feels like a natural extension of that formula. There’s certainly something to be said for the cost, but this is an inescapable aspect of the Toys to Life genre and buying Lego toys in the first place. When it’s tied to a number of smart new gameplay ideas, family friendly humour and beloved franchises that can light up a kid’s eyes… well, maybe it’s worth it?

With just a few days of play under our belts, we’re not quite yet ready to give a verdict and score to Lego Dimensions, but will be back at the start of next week with our final review of the game.