“LEGO Dimensions” Year 2 Has Been a Welcome Gameplay Upgrade — and a Major Technical Faceplant
Now that it seems possible that “Year 2” of LEGO Dimensions will be the game’s last year — and perhaps the end of the toys-to-life fad for the foreseeable future — I think it’s worth assessing the modest strengths and fatal flaws of what is, for all practical purposes, Dimensions 2.0.
When Year 2 touched down this past September, it arrived at just the right moment in the life cycle of Dimensions. Year 1 had consisted of five “Waves” of physical toy packs and corresponding digital content released between September 2015 and May 2016. By the time that first cycle of releases was wrapping up, it was obvious what LD’s strengths and weaknesses were.
Roughly speaking, LD follows the model TT Games’ various other LEGO titles, featuring a simplified platform gameplay revolving around puzzles and collectibles. The most distinctive feature of the TT LEGO games — quickly swapping between characters with different ability sets — was a natural fit for the physical toy aspect of a TTL system.
LD one-upped other TTL titles, however, by wedding its gameplay directly to the physical manipulation of toys on the near field communication (NFC) enabled USB “Toy Pad”. (All TTL feature this peripheral in one form or another; basically, a NFC transmitter/receiver.) Other TTL games are comparatively static; just place a figure on the peripheral and leave it there while you play. LD is dynamic. You’re constantly swapping LEGO minifigures on and off the Toy Pad, both to work various color-coded puzzles and to rotate in needed abilities. This is one of the reasons LD has been so much fun for my son and I. While negotiating the game’s puzzles is a bit too advanced for him on his own, he loves helping me move the pieces around.
Add in the long list of franchises under LD’s umbrella and you basically have a kind of omnibus TT LEGO game with the bonus of real toys. If you’re a fan of TT’s other LEGO titles — which rely on a tried-and-true formula with only minor variations — you’ll almost certainly be a fan of Dimensions.
The problem is that the tried-and-true TT formula can get a bit stale if it’s not constantly being invigorated. TT is getting much better at this with their standalone LEGO titles — last year’s LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens was their most innovative and downright fun game in years. But at the end of the day, all LEGO games, including LD, are about solving puzzles, collecting items, and completing timed races, albeit within a whimsical, tongue-in-cheek plastic universe. That’s pretty much it.
LD’s particular hooks — the physical toys, the Toy Pad-dependent puzzles, and the ambitious multi-franchise angle— were sufficient to sustain the game throughout its first year of releases. However, by the time players were finishing up the last of the new content in early 2016 and ferreting out the game’s remaining Gold Bricks and Minikits (the eternal collectibles of all LEGO games), LD was starting to feel a bit creaky and repetitive. As the Year 1 Waves trickled out, TT Games added new levels and “Adventure Worlds” featuring new franchises, but no significant gameplay changes. (The classic arcade mini-games embedded in the March 2016 Midway content were an exception, but also superfluous, with literally no effect on the LD game itself.) Dimensions needed a shot in the arm to sustain it for another year of releases, beyond the addition of yet more franchises.
Fortunately, TT Games stepped up to the plate and flexed some of the creative muscle they previously demonstrated in titles like the aforementioned LEGO SW:TFA and LEGO Marvel Avengers. We’re now three Waves into Year 2 and it’s plain that the studio shaped the second year of releases partly to immunize LD from tedium. Unfortunately, the welcome appearance of new mechanics and new franchises has been accompanied by downright infuriating bugs associated with the distribution of new content.
More on that in a moment. First, the positives. New characters and franchises of course mean new abilities, including those that interact with new types of puzzles, many of the mini-game variety. Abby Yates from Ghostbusters (2016) has an Intelligence trait that enables her to solve a basic eight-card memory matching game. Ethan Hunt from Mission: Impossible relies on his Fuse Box ability to negotiate a nifty “snake maze” — complete with M:I theme music and a satisfying self-destruct finish that sends LEGO bricks flying. (My son loves that part.) Not every ability is so charming as these. Jake from Adventure Time has a Demon Sword that can break red sparkling Demon Bricks, which feels less like a puzzle and more like another example of weak content gating based on exclusive character abilities. (Looking at you, Unikitty.)
There are lots of new franchises in Year 2; it’s comparable to Year 1 in terms of variety and scale, which is fairly impressive. In addition to the aforementioned Ghostbusters, Mission: Impossible, and Adventure Time, the Year 2 releases thus far include Harry Potter, The A-Team, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Sonic the Hedgehog, Gremlins, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the LEGO Batman Movie, and Knight Rider. Other Year 2 plans include The Goonies, LEGO City: Undercover, Teen Titans GO!, The Powerpuff Girls, and Beetlejuice —although some of those may never materialize if the game winds down early. In general, it’s a nice series of additions to the game’s roster, albeit a bit idiosyncratic, with a curious amount of 1980s and 90s properties alongside contemporary kids’ fare. (Ruminate on this uncanny fact: There is now a LEGO game based on a Brian De Palma film.)
The big structural change in terms of content is the addition of Story Packs to Year 1’s Level Packs, Team Packs, and Fun Packs. Perhaps in acknowledgment of the fact that the Level Packs are a bit light on content — containing only one new story level and one new Adventure World — the Story Packs are big, meaty additions, with six new story levels and a new Adventure World each. So far, Year 2 includes Story Packs for Ghostbusters 2016, Fantastic Beasts, and The LEGO Batman Movie, and all are pretty great shakes: Detailed, long-lasting content that showcases new mechanics and character abilities while loosely recreating their respective films scene by scene.
Each Story Pack also features a new Keystone and corresponding new Toy Pad-related puzzle. The Fantastic Beasts Creation Keystone is pretty weak, a vague and confusing rejiggering of the basic LEGO build ability. The Ghostsbusters Rip Keystone and LEGO Batman Phase Keystone, however, are a lot of fun. Both involve inter-dimensional mechanics that fit the LD storyline well, with the Ghostsbusters leaping between otherworldly pocket dimensions and Batman & Co. yanking useful objects from parallel realities.
Year 2 makes freer use of the intra-franchise character swapping utilized in a limited way in some Year 1 releases. Rather than devote a whole slew of Team and Fun Packs to fleshing out the A-Team’s roster, for example, B.A. Baracus can simply transform into Hannibal, Murdock, and Faceman as needed to use their abilities. Collectors will likely find this disappointing — only one A-Team minifig? — but I for one appreciate any move that dials back the kind of ability-related content gating that required, for example, numerous DC Comics pack purchases in Year 1. (Exactly one of the 1,400+ Gold Bricks in the Year 1 content required Cyborg’s particular set of abilities. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Or smart, smart, smart for TT’s income, I suppose.)
The essential shape of the game remains basically the same, but TT has added some amusing variations and complications to the standard puzzles and races in the “free roam” Adventure Worlds. Some of these are minor tweaks with a strong franchise-specific flavor, such as the nifty Apparate foot races in the Fantastic Beasts world. Others are more radical. The Sonic the Hedgehog gameplay is vastly different from that of a typical LEGO game, being closer to that of the SEGA franchise’s original 16-bit titles. The Sonic-specific rail races — which are sometimes found in other Adventure Worlds, not just Sonic’s — are punishingly difficult, far more challenging than anything else in LD. Depending on your mood, this can be either a breath of fresh air or outright enraging.
All of this would make Year 2 a quality addition to the game, but for one fatal factor: The distribution of the new content is horribly glitchy, in the worst possible way. Namely, downloading new levels and worlds has a habit of irrecoverably erasing your game progress.
Unlike other TTL games, Dimensions is built almost entirely on the downloadable content (DLC) model for delivery of new levels and worlds. New content is purchased through the physical toy sets, but the digital components are delivered through your console’s digital store. So, for example, when I put the Scooby-Doo minifig on the Toy Pad for the first time, the game acknowledged the purchase of the Scooby-Doo Team Pack and downloaded and installed the Scooby-Doo Adventure World from the PlayStation Store.
Critically, this mean that most of LD’s content isn’t included on the game disc packaged with the Starter Pack. Everything outisde the “core game” is downloaded and installed on an as-needed basis. In theory, this makes things simpler for both TT Games and the player. Most gamers aren’t completionists who buy every set, so why clog up the console’s drive with unused content? However, Year 2 has revealed that in practice, the DLC model can be a clusterfuck.
Year 1 went quite smoothly. Other than some minor tweaks to the user interface and play experience, no significant patching to the game was evidently necessary, and all the additional content downloaded and installed without a hitch. Year 2 was… less smooth. The problem seems to lie at the intersection of three components: minor patches to fix standard-issue bugs; the Dimensions save file; and the modular DLC-style installation of new content.
Many of the Wave 2 levels and worlds were shipped with bugs — not issues that made the game unplayable, but small, irritating glitches where it was not immediately apparent that a glitch (as opposed to user error) was involved. The A-Team Adventure World had a persistent problem with its downloading and installation, but this was obviously an issue on TT Games’ or Sony’s end. No, the truly frustrating bugs involved missing or unobtainable Gold Bricks and Minikits, or area-to-area transitions that didn’t quite occur properly. In a puzzle/collectible game, there are few things more exasperating than seeing “24/25 and not being able to find that last Brick. Especially when it turns out that you aren’t blind or an idiot, but that the missing Brick was literally missing from the game. To date, these sort of bugs have occurred on a surprising proportion of the Year 2 content: The A-Team, E.T., Sonic, Adventure Time, and Ghostbusters.
Now, these are annoyances, and a dispiriting sign when compared to the relatively smooth launch of Year 1. But they aren’t the kind of Sisyphean indignities that make you want to smash your console with a hammer. The problem is that when TT Games attempted to fix these issues through minor updates, the game didn’t seem to know how to reconcile those updates with the existing save file that recorded game progress. And so, for example, the application of a new patch to the Ghostbusters 2016 levels would result in the loss of all progress on those levels, resetting it to 0%.
The obvious solutions — backing up and restoring the save file, restarting the game after installation — did nothing to solve the underlying issue. Namely, that an updated level is apparently not compatible with a save file containing pre-update data. After my progress on The A-Team world was wiped out for the second time and I lost the entirety of my Ghostbusters 2016 progress — six levels and the Adventure World, about 15 hours of gameplay — I walked away from Dimensions.
And that’s where I’m going to stay for now. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy the game, and I’m eager to see the new gameplay upgrades that come with the handful of remaining franchises that will be released. But losing significant progress on a game due to a bug is where I draw the line. I like devoting time to new play experiences, or re-visiting old experiences out of a sense of nostalgia — not re-visiting old ones because a glitch has randomly removed all record of that experience. This is Patching 101: Don’t render the user’s save file invalid when pushing an update to a game. Sure, Dimensions is a complicated game content-wise, but there’s no excuse for this nonsense in a title from a marquee game studio (TT being an arm of WB Games).
So Dimensions is going to sit un-played while I wait for all Year 2 releases to be completed and all bugs discovered and corrected, at which point I suppose I’ll decide if this ostensible kids’ game is even worth these headache to complete to 100%. Congratulations, TT. You’ve done something I didn’t think possible: You’ve soured me on a LEGO game.
