Out of all of the Wave 6/Year 2 expansions for LEGO Dimensions, Mission Impossible is arguably one of the strongest franchises on offer. More fresh in people's memory than something like the A-Team, but with more of a widespread appeal than something like the zany Adventure Time, it's a series that at least has potential to lend itself well to a LEGO-y recreation, with enough iconic moments (like that laser scene), and a theme tune that's hummable enough, you can see how it might make for a cool level.
Lucky, then, that Mission Impossible has been given the Level Pack treatment for LEGO Dimensions, bundling together one minifig character, two rebuildable vehicles, and a full level for you to test your skills at.
In total, the Mission Impossible Level Pack includes:
- Minfig: Ethan Hunt
- Vehicle: IMF Sport Car
- Vehicle: IMF Scrambler
And buying the pack will get you access to:
- Mission Impossible Adventure World
- Mission Impossible Battle Arena
- Mission Impossible Level
The Minifig
With just the one minifig on offer, the Mission Impossible Level Pack is headed by Ethan Hunt, a little LEGO take on Mission Impossible's lead character, as played by Tom Cruise. While it's not the greatest of likenesses - Ethan doesn't really have that sort of colour hair in the film - it does come with a double sided head, with a suitably nerdy bespectacled version on one side, complete with headset earpiece, and a more bog standard LEGO face on the other.
However, while the minifig may look fairly standard, Ethan comes packing an absolutely ridiculous list of abilities, making the Mission Impossible set one of the very best value buys for LEGO Dimensions. As a dab hand with a gadget, Ethan can do almost anything technologically based, minimising the amount you'll have to swap out characters as you make your way through the levels, and letting you take advantage of his abilities to get those last few mini-kit pieces, and access those ability specific hidden areas.
Here's Ethan's list of abilities in full:
- Acrobat
- Dive
- Drone
- Fuse Box
- Grappling
- Scan Disguise
- Silver Lego Blow-up
- Stealth
- Technology
- X-Ray Vision
The eagle eyed amongst you will notice there's a few in here that are actually brand new, and exclusive to this character. Scan Disguise is arguably the fanciest here, and makes use of Ethan's binoculars. Standing on a special point in the level will let you use his binoculars to scan the room, looking for a specific person. Find them, and hammer a button, and you'll lock on, at which point you'll be able to assume their identity as a disguise - perfect for sneaking past the security doors that seem to be popping up all over the place now.
You'll need a disguise to get through...
The other exclusive ability here is called Fuse Box, which lets Ethan tackle a brand new snake-like mini-game, as accessed via certain control panels. Presented with a maze set on top of a circuit board, it's up to you to guide a little wire from one end to the other - as it trundles along automatically, and just like the old Nokia 3300 game, you just have to make it change direction to get it safely to the end. You can see a clip of this in action in the gameplay footage below.
Another interesting thing to note is that Ethan is an Acrobat character, one of a very small number of men in the game to be blessed with such gymnastic abilities. Off the top of our head, Legolas is probably the only other one we can think of, although we don't half wish Voldermort could do it too - he'd look great swinging around the brightly coloured pink and blue sparkly poles...
The vehicles
As it's a level pack, the Mission Impossible set comes with two vehicles - the IMF Scrambler and the IMF Sport Car.
The IMF Scrambler is a cool little motorbike that's a pretty fun build, with more to it than you'd think - there's a fair amount of steps to go through before you've got it together. As an added bonus, it also comes on a hinge so you can change its angle - putting it flat for top speed, or leaning back as though it's doing a cool wheelie.
The IMF Sport Car, meanwhile, is pretty much just a car. Built with fairly standard car bits and in a fairly standard car way, the most notable thing about this is that we always thought they were called sports cars, not sport cars, but then maybe that's just us being old fashioned. If nothing else, it's at least a nicely sturdy build, which should hopefully stop it suffering the same fate some of the other vehicles, which never seem to have all their parts when you lift them out the box (we're looking at you, Winged Monkey...)
As an aside, we're still not entirely sure what the IMF Sport Car is supposed to be based on - about the closest we can think of from the series is the BMW i8, although as the level's entirely based on the first Mission Impossible film, we could well be wrong.
In terms of gameplay, both are really pretty much standard vehicles, with nothing all that special to write home about - bar the fact that in their normal, unpgraded forms, they don't half seem a little bit slow
The Rebuilds
However, when it comes to the rebuilds, things quickly get a lot more exciting. Both the IMF Scrambler and the IMF Sport Car can be built in one of three ways - their standard form, or their two rebuilds. This time round, it's arguably the IMF Sport Car that has the coolest selection of rebuilds, transforming into a tank, complete with turret - or, in its final build, a multi-armed submarine named the IMF-Splorer! There aren't too many sea-based vehicles in LEGO Dimensions so far, and this is one of the few.
The IMF Scrambler, meanwhile, is so cool in its original state, the rebuilds don't seem quite so exciting - you have a choice between the ShockCycle - a rocket firing version of the motorbike that Ethan rides backwards, and the IMF Covert Jet, which seems less like a jet, and more like a glorified hoverboard.
The Level
Arguably the most important part of the Mission Impossible Level Pack is, of course, the level itself - and there's a lot of improvements here compared to the levels that came in Year 1. Based on the original Mission Impossible film, this attempts to take you on a whirlwind trip through the story of the film, in a level that lasts for around an hour and a half - and, luckily, contains plenty of automatic checkpoints, so you can pick up where you left off.
Altogether now - Dee dee doooo, dee dee doooo, deee deee doooo, doo doo.
While there are only a few cutscenes here - few enough that you'll really struggle to follow the plot if you've never seen the film - the few that we do have are back up to their usual fantastic standard, packed full of so many little references, and moments of slapstick sillyness that you'd be hard pushed to not sit there with a smile on your face throughout. Tom Cruise playing volleyball with an actual LEGO goose is just one of the highlights - and you're sure to be moved by the tale of one man and his trusty lobster pal.
Well, I don't see any reason our motley crew should arouse suspicion at the evening ball...
The level itself is quite the looker, too - one minute, you'll be infiltrating a high society party, where the marble floor's been polished to an incredibly high sheen, the next you'll be making your way through the shallow puddles of a damp street, looking to jump your IMF Scrambler over a handily placed ramp and make a getaway. There's plenty of opportunities to make good use of Ethan's Mission Impossible abilities too - from the Scan Disguise ability, which you'll regularly need to use to bypass security, to your trusty grapple, which comes in incredibly handy for giving yourself a way to tether yourself to the roof, ready for that scene with the lasers. There are plenty of really cool LEGO builds featured throughout, too - like the really fancy TGV, which you'll fight across the top of as the level reaches its finale.
We were so excited, we couldn't get a good screenshot of it.
Here's a close-up of the cab instead. 10/10, would buy a LEGO Ideas version.
However, while the level may be a more substantial size than those which have come before it, it does have a few big issues. The first is that there are quite a few sections in the level which are effectively one player only. From the very start of the level, where Ethan has to use his agility to swing off poles across the rooftops, to later sections that see you using your magnetic gloves to scale a wall, the game often simply doesn't bother providing a way for your co-op partner to get across.
While in previous games, you'd be able to knock a ladder down, or build a platform for your friend, so they could stick with you as you head through the level, there's no such courtesy here. Instead, you'll simply have to leave your friend behind every time the game calls for an Ethan exclusive ability. And while you can sometimes manage to do an awkward workaround, by summoning a third character to your location, before trying to get player two to switch, you shouldn't have to rely on what's essentially a trick to be able to play in co-op.
If you're Wonder Woman, you'll find yourself doing a lot of hanging around...
And then there's the bugs. From the minor (the tutorial at the start of the level tells you to press square to blow up silver LEGO - press square, and you'll just punch it instead), to the irritating (some help blocks won't actually let you see the list of which characters have that power) to the more serious (the level outright crashed on us as we were leaving the very first area, just as we went from rooftop to party), these are issues you don't really expect from a game that's charging quite as much as LEGO Dimensions does on a pound-per-hour rate. For the price of a fully fledged LEGO game for what's effectively a single (lengthy) level, and a few rather cool mini kits, we'd expect a level that's polished to perfection - not a level that crashes only a few minutes in. Luckily, after the first (drastic) hiccup, the game didn't crash again (unlike the Adventure Time level) - but it's still not what we expected.
So, should you buy Mission Impossible? If you're lukewarm on Mission Impossible, are less OCD than we are about having to collect everything, or if you've got a veritable army of figures already, then you may have a tougher choice ahead. But if you're a big fan of the film, or if you're missing a few of the abilities that the Ethan minifig has, then Mission Impossible could be well worth a look.
