GAME OVERVIEW: Xbox 360®, PlayStation®3, Wii U™, PC, Xbox One®, PlayStation®4 LEGO® Marvel™ Super Heroes features an original story crossing the entire Marvel Universe. Players take control of Iron Man, Spider-Man, the Hulk, Captain America, Wolverine and many more Marvel characters as they unite to stop Loki and a host of other Marvel villains from assembling a super-weapon capable of destroying the world. Players will chase down Cosmic Bricks as they travel across LEGO Manhattan and visit key locations from the Marvel Universe, such as Stark Tower, Asteroid M, a Hydra base and the X-Mansion. Smash, swing and fly in the first LEGO videogame featuring more than 100 of your favorite Super Heroes and Super Villains from the Marvel Universe, including Iron Man, Wolverine, the Hulk, Spider-Man, Captain America, Black Widow, Loki and Deadpool. Help save Earth as your favorite Marvel character with your super-cool strengths and abilities: Iron Man flies, hovers, shoots missiles and unleashes a powerful unibeam directly from his chest.
Spider-Man shoots webs, uses his spider-senses to spot objects invisible to others, crawls up walls and, of course, web-slings. Captain America throws his mighty shield at objects and enemies, embeds it into a wall to create a platform, and protects himself from damage. Perform new and powerful moves as “BIG-fig” characters like Hulk and Abomination. Leave a path of destruction as you smash through LEGO walls and throw cars using hyper strength. Discover LEGO Manhattan like never before, and travel to iconic locations from the Marvel Universe, such as the X-Mansion, Asteroid M and Asgard. Create unique Super Heroes with customizable characters. Enjoy an exciting original story, filled with classic LEGO videogame adventure and humor. GAME OVERVIEW: Nintendo 3DS™, PlayStation® Vita LEGO® Marvel™ Super Heroes: Universe in Peril for Nintendo 3DS™ and PlayStation® Vita features an original story crossing the entire Marvel Universe. Players will chase down Cosmic Bricks as they travel across key locations from the Marvel Universe, such as Stark Tower, Asteroid M, a Hydra base and the X-Mansion.
This changes the review slightly, as a major negative in the original review was the necessity of buying multiple characters, but we have included the original review below all the same. LEGO Dimensions is one of two things. It’s either the best LEGO game Travellers Tales has ever made, or it’s the worst money-grab that Travellers Tales has ever made. That depends entirely on you and what you want from the game. Let’s make this clear right from the start: this game can be goddamn expensive. We’re talking hundreds of pounds, oh-my-god-why-are-there-so-many-toys kind of expensive. If you want to complete every part of the main game, including all the collectibles and gold bricks, you’ll need to spend 80 quid on top of the base set at the very least to buy the extra characters and vehicles that are needed to open new areas and unearth the collectibles. Unlike the other games in the series – in which you could ‘buy’ characters using the studs you collected and then use them on any level that you revisited – now you have to physically buy them.
Using real-life cash… that you collected through doing your day job. That’s going to rankle some players, but it’s worth noting that you can complete the entirety of the story campaign – and get 1000 gamerscore, if that’s your thing – without buying another character or vehicle toy. Nevertheless, when you’re playing through a level, it can become frustrating. You see a section that requires a different character, and rather than thinking ‘I’ll come back to that later!’ you’ll instead check the price of the character on Amazon. Okay, maybe I’ll manage without that collectible… But, having said all that, there’s no doubt in our minds that this is the best LEGO game we’ve played yet. The format remains pretty much identical to the older games in the series, and you can expect to be running around levels smashing everything to bits, building things and solving puzzles just like you have many times before. But the LEGO Gateway, which is what you place the toys upon to make them appear on-screen, takes the puzzles to a whole new level.
Before, you would punch stuff, build stuff, and then use a specific character’s skill to open up the next area. In Dimensions, Travellers Tales has done what no toys-to-life game has managed before by making the portal part of the puzzle. As you progress through the game, your Gateway gains new features. For example, early on you find switches that make your characters glow a certain colour when you run over them. Above a door you’ll see a small diagram that looks just like the Gateway, with each section a different colour. You take Batman and run onto the red switch. The Gateway, sitting in front of you, flashes and the section that Batman is standing on changes colour. But that doesn’t match the diagram. So you pick up Batman and put him on the right section, and that goes red too. Now you switch to Wyldstyle, colour her blue, and move her to the left area. Gandalf turns yellow and takes the last spot and boom – door open. It’s simple, but brilliant. This is just one example – in later levels there are up to five different powers on offer, and in some puzzles you will need to use every one of them, in the right order, to get through the door.
Which brings us onto our next point neatly: this game is not easy. The puzzles require far more brain power than we’ve seen in previous LEGO games. For older gamers, this isn’t a bad thing – the extra challenge is good fun. But for parents picking this up for their children to play alone, it may well be too tough. The best way to enjoy this game is, without a doubt, for a parent and child to sit down together. The parents can enjoy the tougher puzzles, and have fun helping their kids work out how to solve them. The kids will enjoy not only the game itself, but the mixing of characters and universes (which works fantastically), the writing (which is excellent, and is delivered by a stellar cast) and the fact that they will be able to play with actual LEGO when the game is switched off. And that’s worth bearing in mind, too; the game is expensive, but you have to remember that you are also getting real, useable LEGO characters and vehicles that you and any children in your house can enjoy.