LEGO Dimensions Review

The biggest difference between Lego Dimensions and its more established competitors in Disney Infinity and Skylanders is that it is able to fully embody the Toys to Life genre. Lego has existed for over 65 years, filling so many people’s childhoods with little colourful bricks and distinctive characters, with which you could live out your fantasies. They’ve been toys for all this time, and now they’re being brought to life.

Except that they’ve been brought to life time and again over the past decade, thanks to the outstanding and popular games by Traveller’s Tales. Through consistent gameplay and a knowing sense of humour, as they adapt all manner of properties, they’ve earnt their place as a go-to video game franchise for children.

Lego Dimensions is the first real attempt in quite some time to reinvigorate Traveller’s Tales’ gameplay formula, but having the game reach out into the real world and ask you, the player, to physically interact with your figures on the Lego Toy Pad. The core gameplay remains, with button bashing combat and simplistic puzzles which have you switching characters to make use of their various abilities, whether it’s Wonder Woman’s lasso or Marty McFly shredding on his guitar. When in doubt, just start smashing every single piece of scenery you can find.

The Toy Pad helps to break the series’ monotony, thanks to having three distinct and LED-lit sections on which you can place a figure, with up to seven toys supported at once. Always clearly signposted in game, it might be that you move a toy physically to a different section in order to move them to a correspondingly coloured vortex in the game world, or that you’re daubing a segment with a colour that has been assigned to a character in the game. Looking at the Toy Pad’s LED colours can even let you march off to find invisible objects in the game, simply by trying to keep it coloured green.

Though some of the new physical gameplay mechanics can be a little unclear to start off with and could have done with better explanations in game, they’re fairly easy to get the hang of and by the end of the story I was happily hopping from one Toy Pad ability to another, as the puzzles started to grow in complexity. My only other complaint is with how cramped it can feel when there’s too many characters on there, so that I often found myself reverting to the Starter Pack’s trio of Batman, his Batmobile, Gandalf and Wyldstyle.

These three are the only guaranteed characters to play as through the game, and so it’s their abilities which all of the main story’s puzzles are based around. It makes sense, so that you can play from start to finish and see practically all of the game’s content, but it’s also a little unfortunate that when there are so many different potential characters and abilities, everyone outside of those three is effectively relegated to hunting down hidden gold bricks or the person in peril.

Buying more figures to supplement those in the £79.99 Starter Pack will, to many adult minds, be tricky to justify. At £14.99 for a minifig and vehicle/gadget or £26.99 for larger team packs or level packs, the cost can climb quite rapidly. With a child’s entertainment to sate, these can actually offer a surprisingly broad range of in game abilities, thanks to the flexibility of the vehicles and gadgets.

Whereas character minifigs are on read only NFC stands, a core tenet of the game is to have you build and rebuild practically everything else in the game, with vehicles and gadgets having re-writable NFC pads. It starts with making the Toy Pad’s portal over the first few missions, but each vehicle and gadget that you get can be upgraded and transformed into something else. The Batmobile gains the ability to shatter glass and pull down certain walls, while The Simpsons’ TV can be turned into a bizarre MechaHomer that can be used to blow up gold bricks, instead of the standard TV’s silver. All of this is represented both in game and in the toys themselves, and leverages the inherent flexibility of Lego.

While there’s a degree of flexibility and you won’t miss much of anything from the main story, buying more toys from different universes does unlock their respective hub worlds to explore and play in. However, it’s the level packs which really add something more substantial, with an hour-long level, hub world and three toys in the box rather than two. They bring something more interesting to the mix and allow other characters to star for a while.

The Portal 2 pack is simply sublime – especially when considered alongside the excellence of the Portal 2 level in the main story – and adds another enjoyable chapter to the video game series while making me genuinely excited to see what the Doctor Who pack can bring in November. Back to the Future is more by the numbers, though it has an interesting Hill Valley hub that jumps between time periods, but The Simpsons content is a low point that loses so much of the charm and heart of the TV show’s early years in favour of having Homer as a foolish, loud mouthed oaf without his family there to add an extra layer to his adventure.

The way that worlds collide through the story is often quite spectacular, whether it’s just for a few seconds or playing with a particular mash-up for the length of a level. However, our three main protagonists tend to be passing through in the background, and never get to really interact with each world’s friendly characters – how could they, when there’s no guarantee of a physical toy for you to play with? – which is a slight shame. A little more annoying is the seemingly endless repetition of some lines of dialogue between your characters, or the amusing way that you can break level progression and skip puzzles simply by hopping to a flying vehicle and going over the top.

Of all the Toys to Life games, Lego Dimensions is perhaps the most literal interpretation of the genre yet. Thanks to some clever ideas with the Toy Pad and the inherent flexibility of Lego itself, it’s able to breach the divide between the game and the real world in some interesting ways. It doesn’t always get that blend quite right, and the price of entry is very high, but it’s an excellent first attempt that’s full of nostalgia and more than a few moments of brilliance.

Score: 8/10

Version tested: PlayStation 4