What you won’t like
You’re going to spend a lot of money
This is more of a failing of the toys-to-life genre than it is this specific game, but Lego Dimensions is going to be a costly habit to support. Although not all of the expansions are available now, Lego Dimensions has characters and levels from 14 different popular entertainment franchises right out of the box. For reference, the second wave launches in November 2015, the third wave hits stores in January 2016, wave four is slated for March 2016, and the final, fifth round will appear in May 2016.
Expansions come in three different flavors: Level Packs, Team Packs, and Fun Packs. Level packs include new characters and some combination of vehicles and gadgets, and they also unlock new stand-alone levels associated with that specific franchise. Team Packs always include two figures and some combination of vehicles and/or gadgets. Fun Packs are the smallest sets and only include one figure and one gadget or vehicle. All three types of sets also unlock the Adventure World associated with that particular franchise if that’s the first character of that franchise you’ve purchased.
Above: The world of Valve’s PC puzzler Portal is featured in one of the first Level Packs.
With 37 different packs currently on the books ranging from $15 for the Fun Packs to $30 for the Level Packs, it will cost you quite a bit of money to collect them all.
It’s similar to Traveller’s Tales previous Lego Games
While Lego Dimensions does add a lot of variety in both setting, characters, and new gameplay options, its core game borrows heavily from TT’s previous Lego games, such as the Lego Star Wars series, Lego Harry Potter, Lego Lord of the Rings, and others. You basically run around, beat up objects to get studs (which you later use to purchase various unlockable upgrades), try to collect the hidden minikits in each level, and find all the characters that have the special abilities you need to unlock everything in a given level.
None of these things are necessarily negative in and of themselves. If you’ve played many of Traveller’s Tales previous Lego games (or every single one, like I did), however, you might suffer a little fatigue over the sameness of Lego Dimensions.
A few (really) minor glitches
A handful of times, characters that were on the portal disappeared from the game for no explicable reason. This was easily solved, though, by removing them from the Toy Pad and putting them back again.
Also, vehicles such as the Batmobile would sometimes get stuck on objects. This also had the same simple fix: remove and replace the vehicle on the Toy Pad.
Above: Gollum, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Middle-earth any more.
Honestly, you move characters and vehicles around the portal so often during the course of the game, this wasn’t really a hassle. To the developer’s credit, as their first foray into toy-to-life games, Lego Dimensions seemed to be far more bug-free than even the recent editions of its competitors, Disney Infinity 3.0 and Skylanders Superchargers.
Conclusion
Lego Dimensions truly sets a new standard for toys-to-life games. The pure joy of playing with actual Lego bricks (even offline) combined with many innovations that make the Toy Pad peripheral an actual, useful item, sets this game apart from its competitors. Clever and humorous writing and respect given to the original franchises give Lego Dimensions a huge amount of variety such that at least some parts of it should appeal to just about any gamer. If (like most normal, middle-class people) you can afford only one toys-to-life game (and all of its add-ons) this season, Lego Dimensions would be my first recommendation.
Score: 95/100
Lego Dimensions is available now for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Wii U, PS3, and Xbox 360. The publisher provided GamesBeat with an Xbox One copy of the Starter Pack for the purpose of this review.