Lego Dimensions Ghostbusters Review: It Ghosted My Game

Lego Dimensions recently kicked off its second year with a whole bunch of new game packs, including a rather meaty story-driven outing for the latest (re)incarnation of Ghostbusters. Unfortunately, a rather nasty bug looks to have made a phantom out of my game's save data.

The Lego Dimensions universe expanded last week with the launch of Wave 6 playsets. These include a couple of story packs for Mission Impossible and Adventure Time, as well as team packs for Harry Potter and Adventure Time, and as a Fun Pack for The A-Team. While all of those sets introduce plenty of fun to be had with new characters, Adventure Worlds loaded with activities and the recently introduced multiplayer Battle Arenas, the big get for this latest batch of blocky goodness was the Ghostbusters Story Pack, including all of the usual trimmings, as well as a full campaign and the ability to turn the Lego Dimensions portal into the Busters' HQ from the film.

I've become a big fan of Lego Dimensions over the past year, enjoying its unique brand of family-friendly humor, creative puzzles, lovingly crafted worlds and, of course, an excuse to play with Legos. More than anything, though, I've gotten a kick out of the way the game blends oodles of properties, peppering story missions with a variety of characters and giving players a chance to create their dream team of heroes and villains from worlds like DC Comics, The Simpsons, Portal, The Lord of the Rings and much, much more.

That's why I was so excited to hear that the fun would be continuing into a second year of collectable sets, including new properties like those featured in Wave 6, as well as upcoming sets boasting Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Beetlejuice, Sonic, The Powerpuff Girls and more.

Rather than release a whole new core game, though, the team at Traveller's Tales made the wise decision of allowing players to simply continue growing the experience they've already poured a year's worth of time into with the launch of additional sets. But that doesn't mean that there isn't plenty of new story content to be had.

The new Ghostbusters set, for instance, lets you play through the entirety of the new film, an adventure spread across six full missions that take half a dozen hours to complete. Rather than bring out a full-priced game based on the new movie, this allows Lego Dimensions to host a game within a game, so to speak, complete with the ability to insert characters that have no business being in that particular campaign.

And honestly, up until a point, I was having a blast with everything on offer here. There really is a heck of a lot of content packed into these game sets, levels and Adventure Worlds, with a ridiculous number of collectibles to uncover, puzzles to solve and baddies to beat.

The Ghostbusters story missions are actually pretty faithful to the movie, following paranormal investigators Abby, Erin, Jillian and Patty on their quest to become the world's first (or second, really) specter-catching team.

Within the story missions, the Abby figure has the ability to turn into any of her cohorts, each with their own special abilities. You'll need to swap between members on the fly to solve many of the campaign's puzzles, or your co-op partner can actually take control of one of the extra characters without needing to place another figure on the Dimensions portal.

When you're not busy busting ghosts in the campaign, you can drop into the set's Adventure World, which is a take on New York pulled from the movie. Like all other Lego Dimensions Adventure Worlds, this one is big, busy and does a nice job of capturing the feel of its source material. There's also a large number of activities and challenges to tackle, with occasional hauntings requiring you to break out the proton packs from time to time.

Unfortunately, all of that fun came to a crashing halt when I encountered a nasty bug. I would call it "game-ending," but the damage actually spread quite a bit further than that.

Near the very end of the final story chapter, going toe-to-toe with a building-sized spook, the game froze on me. Not a big deal, it happens, so I just rebooted the console and tried to dive right back in. When I went to the mission select screen, however, I noticed that I no longer had the ability to continue my game from the final chapter. In fact, more than that, it now showed that I had not played through any of the Ghostbusters chapters and, when I went to check out the Adventure World, I saw that all of my progress from all Wave 6 packs had been completely erased.

That's obviously pretty bad, but it actually gets far worse. While the game acknowledges that I have unlocked the chapters from the original Dimensions campaign, my progress in the story mode and the Adventure Worlds has been almost completely wiped. As I said before, Lego Dimensions is full of collectibles, secrets and the like and, after the Ghostbusters crash, almost all of that progress has been erased.

This, of course, led me to searching the internet for similar horror stories and it looks like I'm not the only one to have had this happen. In short, while I greatly enjoyed my time with Lego Dimensions' Wave 6 content, I cannot recommend anyone rush out and grab the Ghostbusters set until this issue has been addressed. I was pretty frustrated with how the whole ordeal came crashing down, obviously, but I hate to imagine the blow this would be to a more diehard fan. Such a bummer.

As this incident was caused by a glitch, it's difficult to quantify my experience with a review score. While others have had the same thing happen in their playthrough, it doesn't appear to be a widespread issue. In other words, whether or not any of this is worth that risk is officially up to you. As I said, things were going swimmingly right up until the end, but something this damaging cannot be overlooked. It may not be an intended part of the experience, but it certainly ruined mine.

This review and score will be updated if a patch is released addressing the issue.