Another six months, another LEGO game. Instead of trying to further develop the engine used in LEGO City, Traveler’s Tales has gone right back to using its same old formula of linear and mediocre 3D action platforming. The twist is that it now uses a gimmick that will seek to send players to the poor house by exploiting their love of LEGO and multiple franchises from the past. At its core, it’s a cynical and shameless cash grab that cares to do nothing interesting.

The game’s plot involves a new villain named Vortech, who seeks to control all of the dimensions because he’s evil, of course. So to accomplish this, he needs various artifacts of powerful significance in each of the worlds, as well as important characters from these dimensions. Gandalf, Wildstyle, and The Batman from LEGO Batman all team up to put a stop to his plans. This of course means traipsing throughout these worlds, all of which play in the same fashion as any other LEGO game. But there’s a twist! The game makes use of a USB dongle called the Toy Tag, which works like a NFC device like the Wii-U Gamepad, only now there are seven slots to use. Just put in a tag with the relevant character or vehicle and they will show up in the game. Each character uses different abilities to solve the simple obstacles the levels throw at you, and there are segments where you will have to fight enemies, usually with the same clunky melee combat seen in the other games. But some areas can’t be accessed with the starter pack characters you get by default. This is where the game exposes it’s true and cynical colors.

While one could excuse the brilliant marketing move made by WB Games, where you have to buy various packs to visit extra worlds, but you also will need to get team packs just to unlock some areas in the levels. That can’t be forgiven. Such an action is very anti-consumer, and it’s unacceptable any way you could slice it. But outside of that and the mediocre gameplay you’ve come to expect from Traveler’s Tales, the game’s gimmick of using the Toy Tag is not by any means innovative. In fact, it’s completely unnecessary. You don’t even need to physically build the vehicles or even mount the character’s on their tags. All the game needs to check is the code within the tag, making building pointless despite the game’s insistence in getting you to waste your time.

The soundtrack isn’t all that impressive aside from the familiar themes used in each franchise, but at least the voice-acting is good for what the game is. Honestly, these games seem to appeal only to those with a fetish for swag and a love of old franchises and LEGO’s, as the gameplay isn’t anything to write home about. One could suppose that co-op play might make the game more entertaining, or for the moments where you could see Homer Simpson driving the Batmobile over Captain America, but $100+ USD might be too expensive of an initial investment for that. If you must play this game, wait for a price drop of several degrees.

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