The Gateway is open. LEGO Dimensions for Wii U is in stores now!
Lego Dimensions is the year's best toys-to-life game, injecting the buildable fun of Lego toys into a hilarious adventure that sees Batman fighting side-by-side with Gandalf, Doctor Who, Homer Simpson, Scooby Doo, Portal's Chell, the Ghostbusters, and dozens of other well-known characters. Developer TT Games has been making great Lego games for a decade, and this is one of the studio's finest adventures yet - but it costs an arm and a leg if you want to see it all.
One of Lego Dimensions' earliest missions asks the player to put the controller down, open up a box of Lego bricks, dump them onto the ground, and follow an onscreen instruction manual to build a play set consisting of more than 250 pieces. This is an odd request for a game to make, since the process takes roughly 10 to 15 minutes to complete, but it represents Lego Dimensions' hallmark feature: a functional toy component that is both fun and an integral part of the experience.
Rival toys-to-life games, Skylanders and Disney Infinity, look great on shelves and are highly collectible, but don't offer much in terms of real-world playability outside of the rare set of spinning wheels. Lego Dimensions' toys are meant to be played with, and like any Lego set, make the imagination run wild with building possibilities.
Throughout Lego Dimensions' entire adventure, TT Games keeps the toys' appeal in the forefront, pushing players to take a break from pressing buttons to assemble a new Lego contraption, tear apart a vehicle to rebuild it in a different way, or move a minifigure to different places on the portal to trigger something within the game. Players don't have to build anything if they don't want to (the game only reads the base, not the arrangement of pieces on top), but I thoroughly enjoyed all of the building challenges and found many of the designs to be ingenious, especially given how few pieces are used for the builds.
The game itself fits nicely into the lineage of Lego titles created by TT Games. If you've played any of these Lego titles, you know exactly what to expect from Lego Dimensions: plenty of fist-swinging to smash a Lego object into a sea of bricks, followed by holding down a button to rapidly reassemble the pieces into a different form. Puzzle solving is heavily sewn into all levels, and most characters play a different role in how these riddles are completed. Minikits and secret studs are hidden in every stage.
One of Lego Dimensions' earliest missions asks the player to put the controller down, open up a box of Lego bricks, dump them onto the ground, and follow an onscreen instruction manual to build a play set consisting of more than 250 pieces. This is an odd request for a game to make, since the process takes roughly 10 to 15 minutes to complete, but it represents Lego Dimensions' hallmark feature: a functional toy component that is both fun and an integral part of the experience.
Rival toys-to-life games, Skylanders and Disney Infinity, look great on shelves and are highly collectible, but don't offer much in terms of real-world playability outside of the rare set of spinning wheels. Lego Dimensions' toys are meant to be played with, and like any Lego set, make the imagination run wild with building possibilities.
Throughout Lego Dimensions' entire adventure, TT Games keeps the toys' appeal in the forefront, pushing players to take a break from pressing buttons to assemble a new Lego contraption, tear apart a vehicle to rebuild it in a different way, or move a minifigure to different places on the portal to trigger something within the game. Players don't have to build anything if they don't want to (the game only reads the base, not the arrangement of pieces on top), but I thoroughly enjoyed all of the building challenges and found many of the designs to be ingenious, especially given how few pieces are used for the builds.
The game itself fits nicely into the lineage of Lego titles created by TT Games. If you've played any of these Lego titles, you know exactly what to expect from Lego Dimensions: plenty of fist-swinging to smash a Lego object into a sea of bricks, followed by holding down a button to rapidly reassemble the pieces into a different form. Puzzle solving is heavily sewn into all levels, and most characters play a different role in how these riddles are completed. Minikits and secret studs are hidden in every stage.
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