Portal test subject Chell, Gandalf the Grey and Batman walk into the Aperture Science labs accompanied by Doc Brown’s DeLorean... But that’s not the setup for poorly written gag - it’s the beginning of my E3 hands-on with the Portal 2 section of Lego Dimensions.
While the science facility setting from Valve’s famous first-person puzzle series has appropriately been rebuilt brick by virtual Lego brick, all of the Portal hallmarks remain - from the constant sarcastic sass spouted by the chatty GLaDOS to the depressed tones of the eternally bummed out robot turrets. Even the ‘cake is a lie’ graffiti makes an appearance on the concrete wall behind the lab’s facade, although in typically cheeky Lego series fashion someone has scrawled ‘the cake is in the kitchen on floor 2’ below it.
What changed is the gameplay itself. In order to make the experience more kid-friendly, the emphasis on Chell’s portal gun seems to have been reduced when it comes to puzzle-solving — indeed it was only used twice during my hands-on and at extremely well-telegraphed points in the level. Yet whereas previous Lego games so often adhere to a ‘smash everything and hope for the best’ strategy to puzzle-solving, Lego Dimensions adopts some clever uses of its physical ‘toy pad’ peripheral in an attempt to make things more tactile and fun.
For example, at certain points in my hands-on the three light-up sections of the toy pad had to be coloured by positioning a character on a coloured pad onscreen to ‘paint’ them, and then physically moving their actual minifig to the correspondingly coloured panel on the toy pad itself. At other times, I had to find hidden items in the world using the toy pad as a guide - it flashed red when I went in the wrong direction and then gradually shifted to green as I steered towards the right spot.
Not all of the puzzle-solving was toy pad-related though, at another point I used an environmental ‘keystone’ to scale Batman to about ten times his normal size, allowing his extra height to activate an otherwise out of reach lever. Later I called upon Gandalf’s gift for magic to propel a levitated Companion Cube through a series of tubes and onto one of Aperture Science’s signature big red buttons.
After playing a portion of Lego Dimensions' Portal 2-inspired section, I’m near convinced that Traveller’s Tales is going to be the first developer to deliver a ‘toys to life’ game that finally makes sense to me as both a gamer a parent. I’ve previously resisted the likes of Skylanders and Disney Infinity, not based off the quality of the software or even the financial cost associated with maximising their relative experiences via the numerous character expansions, but simply because the ‘toys’ were not really toys. How do you play with a static Skylander after you’ve turned your console off? What kind of interaction can you have with an Infinity figurine other than putting it on and taking it off the shelf?
The biggest point of difference with Lego Dimensions is that everything you buy for it is made of Lego; that you can tear down and repurpose as you see fit; and that appeals to me immensely. Add in the unprecedented pop culture clash that mixes so many franchises that I love (in a surprise moment during the Portal demo a rift in the ceiling opened and Homer Simpson crashed through it clinging to a wrecking ball), and Lego Dimensions could admittedly become quite a costly and ongoing investment for me come September. But at least I can feel quite confident that it will be an investment that offers playtime rewards long after the video game part has been completed.