Are there any impressions of the Battle Arenas yet?
I made the plunge on Skylanders (got rid of them) and Disney Infinity Star Wars (but that just feels a bit dull), how does this compare? The gf and I still have LEGO TFA to play through though so this is a hard sell.
Honestly, it's really difficult for me to land on a solid assessment. For me, it's a great all around product. And I don't mind the cost investment just because it's something easily justifiable as a family expenditure as opposed to thinking of it as like a DLC budget for a video game. My son loves LEGO toys. He loves LEGO video games. It's a great mixture of the two things. It's the perfect Toys to Life product for us.
So, I'll start with what I think are the strengths. It oozes charm. While some of the level packs come across as lazy (I'm looking at you Back to the Future Level Pack), the overall campaign is something you really haven't seen before. None of the LEGO games up 'til now attempt to blend together the various properties. Further, even games that do have cross-franchise representation don't really attempt to tell one story. I know Infinity has some toy box stuff that's wide open, but in terms of playsets the various franchises remain quarantined. So it's just really neat to see all this DC Comics and LEGO Movie and Portal and Ghostbusters and... etc. come together in one story where characters are interacting on screen. Every individual franchise also having its own little hub world to explore also proved more endearing than I expected, and was particularly appreciated by my son who sometimes gets frustrated with the puzzle-based gameplay of the story levels.
The downside I think is just that you do need to be prepared to invest real money into this to get the most out of it. I mean, yeah, you can complete the main campaign with the starter set. But I just feel like there are hooks everywhere reminding you what you're missing out on. Hire-a-hero was added after launch as a decent compromise to allow you to not
have to make the purchase for to get by this obstacle stopping you from that gold brick, but you just run into this stuff continuously. The other problem I've kind of talked about is just that I feel like a lot of the vehicle builds are rather superfluous. They're neat enough if you like micro-build LEGO stuff, but to me they neither make for great display toys nor are they often very useful in the game. There are some exceptions. But as a big fan of LEGO toys I find myself really digging the minifigs and really indifferent to most of the vehicle/item builds.
The other downside is that I'll note that most of the portal interaction wears thin pretty quickly. Initially, it's really cool that they've thought of a way to make it more interactive and not just as a mechanism for unlocking overpriced DLC. But particularly in later campaign areas where they are throwing portal-based puzzles at you left and right, it just starts to get tedious.
Overall, I really like it. But in terms of whether or not I'd recommend it I think it's really useful to know what you're expecting going in.
