There came a moment when Marty McFly, Chell from Portal, and The Wicked Witch of the West were all fighting a giant Lex Luthor robot atop a building in Springfield when I stopped and wondered just what the hell I was doing. But then again, I was having a complete blast, so who am I to judge?

LEGO Dimensions is the series’ first foray into the Toys to Life genre, and in melding the worlds of video games and physical objects, developer Traveler’s Tales has decided to go with the kitchen sink approach to the game. Throughout the dozens of missions and worlds to explore, you’ll bounce from classic movies like Back to the Future and beloved comics like Batman to amazing games like Portal. This wide-ranging insanity is Dimension’s greatest strength, but also its biggest weakness.

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Wandering through levels based on properties I love like Scooby-Doo and The Wizard of Oz provided a ton of fun. The love and care given to packing those worlds with cute, clever nods -- falling off the map in Oz drops you down into a sepia-colored version of tornado-wrecked Kansas -- made exploring those spaces a treat. It’s even better when Dimensions mashes two properties together, like when Sauron from Lord of the Rings goes on a tear through Metropolis. These collisions are fun, creative, and rife with hilarious, idiosyncratic interactions.Traveler’s Tales’ fantastic brand of Pixar-esque humor can make a kid laugh while simultaneously having more nuanced jokes aimed at adults had me smiling throughout most of my time with the game. A particularly great moment was when Batman travels to Oz and is convinced that the Scarecrow from the classic movie is the same Scarecrow that has terrorized Gotham City.

Sadly, Dimensions’ breadth of inspirations is a double-edged sword, meaning that if you’re not as familiar with a specific property, you might not find as much enjoyment in those sections. For example, when I spent a half hour fighting through a series of Ninjago bosses, I noticed that my interest in Dimensions started to wane. Whereas previous LEGO games were generally built around a single property like Marvel, Harry Potter, or Indiana Jones that you’d know if you’d be interested from the get-go, Dimensions can be a bit of a crap shoot. A solid chunk of the enjoyment directly correlates with your love of a specific movie or game, and your ability to understand and appreciate deep-cut references.

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Worlds aside, the bulk of the core gameplay mechanics here are going to feel incredibly familiar to anybody who’s played any of the past dozen or so LEGO games. You destroy everything in sight, build a whole bunch of crazy structures, and collect millions of bolts that act as currency. The big change with Dimensions, though, is the physicality introduced through the toys and the portal. Any character or object you place on one of the portal’s seven positions is transported into the game world.

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Dimensions quickly begins throwing puzzles at you that require physically manipulating the toys on the portal itself. Bosses will trap your character in an energy field, forcing you to move that piece to another square on the board. Likewise, certain puzzles require you to have specific characters turn a specific color, then have you place that character in the right spot to correlate with the solution.While I really appreciate this idea in practice, it oftentimes didn’t work for me in execution. Puzzles were never quite deep enough to deliver that much-appreciated “aha!” moment, and instead, the act of physically moving Batman and Gandalf across the portal dozens of times in a given stage just acted as a barrier between myself and the next piece of much-appreciated humor or creativity.On a similar topic, the schematics for building the various LEGO creations, be it a velociraptor from Jurassic World or the DeLorean from Back to the Future, aren’t included with the physical toys themselves, but rather need to be unlocked within the game proper. It’s a bit strange that there’s a wall erected between the toy I purchased and the means of putting it together, and really would’ve loved it if I was able to piece together the toys removed from the game itself.There’s a lot to unpack in LEGO Dimensions. The campaign is lengthy, there are dozens of free-play stages, and nearly 500 Gold Bricks to collect. Check back early next week for our full review.

Marty Sliva is a Senior Editor at IGN. He once ate a whole blueberry. Follow him on Twitter @McBiggitty.