LEGO Dimensions

Lego Dimensions was a cute enough idea, but part of that questionable toys-to-life trend a few games attempted back in the day. That makes this content difficult to revisit and kind of in this weird place for the franchise's history.

That aside, the game itself is pretty fun. If you've played a Lego game you can know what to expect. It is very generic, simple, and accessible. It's just fine, really, much like the story, which feels like a standard DLC tie-in for the game. What is cool is how authentic a number of Doctor Who things are recreated in Lego form, with lots of great voice acting, audio from the show, and even Murray Gold music to enhance it heavily. It all showcases how much of a missed opportunity Doctor Who video games feel like. There is a lot of potential for a great Doctor Who game, I'm just not sure it exists anywhere. This one is at least competently made, and it is fun having the Doctor meet Batman and Gandalf, I guess, but that is heavily diminished by the voice actors used for these non-Who characters and the lacklustre story, which doesn't even really focus on Doctor Who characters much at all.

I have a certain fondness for the LEGO games, so when I found out LEGO were going to be taking on my favourite TV series as part of LEGO Dimensions I was more than a little excited. Especially when it turned out Doctor Who would be getting a level pack - a level that's designed to show what a LEGO game based on the franchise would look like by providing a level.

As you would expect for a LEGO game, the story's pretty basic so there's no complex paradoxes here. The Doctor (Peter Capaldi) arrives in a future London where the Daleks have launched a wide invasion. In order to stop the Dalek invasion, he must travel back to Victorian and 2015 London (where a familiar junkyard can be found) before using a teleporter in future London to arrive on the Dalek spaceship and fight Davros (Julian Bleach). What's really cool with this story is how it combines a classic series feel with a new series vibe. You basically have the timey wimey element of the Moffat era with a plot that bares obvious similarities to The Dalek Invasion of Earth (which the game developer Traveller's Tales lovingly poke fun at themselves with by calling it 'The Dalek Extermination of Earth'). This kind of feels like how that classic 1964 serial would have looked like if it had been a LEGO animation with a big budget. Obviously Davros wouldn't have been included considering he wasn't introduced until Genesis of the Daleks but apart from that you could imagine this is what the production team would have gone for with LEGO's resources.

There are so many nice references to the show throughout this videogame level too, such as the I.M. Foreman junkyard and all the Doctors in the LEGO recreation of the current title sequence. Davros even appears in his Remembrance of the Daleks look. There is no doubt about it that Traveller's Tales are massive fans of the show. One moment that many other Whovians like myself are sure to love is when you have to rescue Clara Oswald from a K1 Robot from Tom Baker's debut serial as the Doctor 'Robot'.

LEGO is the perfect fit for Doctor Who too. The LEGO games often rely on puzzle solving and this is fitting with the TV series. The show does, after all, encourage the use of brains over brawn in order to solve situations. It's probably the best way to do a Doctor Who game that feels appropriate for the show. One part of the game requires you to move the Doctor around a Pac-Man style maze and hit four red buttons in order to hack a computer terminal. It may sound odd written like this but these Pac-Man mazes offer a lot of fun and variety to the gameplay, which some would argue the LEGO games need after using their successful formula for so long.

The most amazing thing about the Doctor Who level pack, however, is that not only do you get a level but you get every incarnation of the Doctor. That's right: as well as Peter Capaldi you get William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Paul McGann, Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, Matt Smith and even John Hurt. Each Doctor has their respective TARDIS console rooms too. William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton's are in black and white! This is only a small portion of the LEGO Dimensions game but the attention to detail is incredible. The Adventure World (basically, a hub world) itself has Present Day London, Skaro, Mars, Trenzalore and even the Cybermen's second home planet Telos.

Every voice actor used for the characters is from the series too. Peter Capaldi voices the Doctor, Jenna Coleman is Clara, Michelle Gomez is Missy, Julian Bleach plays Davros, Nicholas Briggs voices the Daleks and Cybermen, Neve McIntosh voices Vastra, Dan Starkey is Strax and they even have John Barrowman as Captain Jack Harkness. This allows for a very authentic take on the TV series, meaning it actually feels like playing in the world of the TV show recreated in LEGO. Even the other Doctors have voice clips taken from the TV series, when they could easily have been left mute like other characters in the game such as Bart Simpson.

Overall, The Dalek Extermination of Earth is a brilliant LEGO Doctor Who level pack for the fantastic game LEGO Dimensions and one any Whovian should buy. It's an authentic LEGO take on the series full of many fan references and voiced by actors from the show. The gameplay is relevant to the series' theme of brain over brawn and the story nicely acknowledges the classic series serial The Dalek Invasion of Earth. I hope at some point we get a fully-fledged Doctor Who videogame or at the very least some more NFC minifigures (Strax has seemingly leaked out as one who will be playable at some point) as it would be a shame if this and the Cyberman fun pack were to be the only LEGO Doctor Who videogame content.