While playing with Lego playsets as a kid was always fun, everyone knows the best part was mixing those boxes together and having a pirate take on an army of dinosaurs as the Millennium Falcon swooshed overhead. Lego Dimensions is meant to recreate that feeling of nonsensical childhood bliss by bringing together beloved pop culture properties into a single game, so Batman can take aim at the Scarecrow (from The Wizard of Oz) while Gandalf laughs about it in the background. Just like you remember.

The game's story is built to accommodate all that world-mixing, as it's kicked off by a villain creating transdimensional travel for the express purpose of kidnapping famous characters we all know and love. Specifically, famous characters from Lord of the Rings, The Wizard of Oz, Portal, and plenty more (all of which will get their ). In preparation for Dimensions' release for every major console (including Xbox 360 and PS3) on September 27th, we've gotten a chance to dig through Lego's toy box and see what the game has in store. We're ready to share that all with you, and not just because our moms told us to.

It may feel like a lifetime since the Doctor Who Lego Dimension playset was first leaked by the developer's own PDF instruction page, but all the wibbly wobbly timey-wimey wait is over. Now we have official confirmation of not one, not twelve, two different Doctor Who packs, one starter and one bonus.

Announced at San Diego Comic Con, the starter pack and its associated level will feature all the touchstones of a proper Doctor Who experience, like Daleks, Cybermen, the TARDIS, and K-9. In addition, it will contain figures for the 12th Doctor (voiced by original actor Peter Capaldi, alongside Clara Oswald's actress Jenna Coleman and Missy's Michelle Gomez), the TARDIS, and K-9, with the latter two acting as rebuildable vehicles. And fear not, fans of the earlier seasons: the 1st and the 12th Doctors will both appear in the game, and when one is defeated, he'll regenerate as the other (and the appearance of all twelve Doctors in the trailer below suggests that roster could grow). Meanwhile, the extra Doctor Who fun pack will come bearing a playable Cyberman figure and a rebuildable Dalek, just in case you weren't nerding out hard enough yet.

I know we've all been staring forlornly at our Skylanders, amiibo, and Disney Infinity figures wondering when the next toys-to-life franchise will come around, and bless Lego Dimensions for being the next to deliver. Of course, in less cheeky terms, Lego is uniquely qualified to work within the format, since it's been making both parts of the equation for years.

The game's accompanying portal (which you build from bricks before you start playing) works the way you would expect, acting as a stage where you can place whatever characters you want to load into the game. However, Dimensions' portal is unique in that it's divided into three parts, and will make it possible to move up to seven characters (or objects, but more on that later) between those three sections at will. In fact, that becomes an important part of the game in some situations; during boss fights, for instance, a red light will flash under one segment when the boss attacks the characters standing there, and their hold can be broken by moving the figures to another space. Someone should tell Dorothy that all you need to beat the Wicked Witch's magic is to move over a square.

During my time with the Dimensions' demo, I had far too much fun taking Scooby Doo on a joyride through the Lego-fied poppy fields of Oz (while he's covering his eyes, naturally) before crashing into a fight with the Wicked Witch over a crystallized piece of the universe. That reality-smushing is not only a common occurrence in Dimensions, but is meant to be the driving force of the game, as you experience fourteen different worlds crashing together in humorous, light-hearted ways. Specifically, you'll see memorable places and faces from The Simpsons, Doctor Who, Ghostbusters, Portal, Jurassic World, Midway Arcade, Lego Chima, Scooby-Doo!, DC Comics, Lord of the Rings, The Lego Movie, The Wizard of Oz, Ninjago, and Back to the Future, all interacting as your additional playset figures allow.

Integrating this many franchises could be risky, because time constraints could mean that there's little time to treat each property with the respect it deserves. But Dimensions seems to be on the right path so far, as it puts real care was put into integrating different pieces of these stories well. The poppies in Oz make characters sleepy, the cartoony look of the Scooby-Doo world matches the original show, and transdimensional madness takes hold of Middle Earth while Gandalf is fighting the Balrog. Plus, the game contains original music from its source material and voice performance from some characters' original actors, showing a commitment to treating these tales with respect. We won't know for sure until the game is released this fall, but the fact that few moments go by without Batman being comically grumpy makes me hopeful.

As much fun as a Lego game can be, it just doesn't feel quite right if there isn't a building component involved. Lego Dimensions not only lets you build your own block creations, but actually takes it out of the digital realm and does what Lego does best: lets you build with actual blocks you hold in your hands.

Each playset comes with at least one vehicle that's built out of a series of Lego blocks, and it will need to be transformed into something new depending on what function you need it to serve. The Delorean, for instance, has one form to emphasize speed and another that gives off bursts of electricity, both of which could be super handy in the right circumstance. In order to change the vehicle in the game, you'll have to take it apart in real life and physically build it into what you want it to be, based on a digital version of Lego's familiar schematics. You're admittedly limited in what you can create (with each auto sporting three transformations maximum), and the game can only do so much to confirm you actually rebuilt your car, so it's forced to take you at your word when you say you did it. That could make the mechanic feel gimmicky in the long run, since it doesn't actually affect the gameplay in a measurable way, but it could still be fun for players who enjoy the novelty of putting a controller down to play a game to the fullest.

While there are plenty of playable figures planned for Dimensions, the story will following the antics of Batman, Gandalf and Wyldstyle, showing the eclectic mix you can expect from the overall game and banking on The Lego Movie's popularity in one go. Each loses a friend in the game's opening (Robin for Batman and Frodo for Gandalf), which is what sends them on their journey through the game's many worlds.

These three characters will come in a starter pack with the game portal and the Batmobile, giving you plenty of stuff to play with right off the bat <(i>ha). Each has unique special abilities that help you progress through the many worlds you'll visit, like using a Bathook to pull apart obstructions or using Wyldstyle's master builder powers to uncover hidden keys. They'll be the primary focus of any story-based cutscenes as they work to recover pieces of dimension energy and rescue the captive Lego characters of the universe. Expect a colony of bat puns along the way.

Of course, that doesn't mean that our three heroes will be the only stars of this show. At any point you can introduce characters from other playsets into your game, letting them tag along beside the main three or having them act as your primary character. Each extra pack will also come with a vehicle that can be loaded into the game (like the Batmobile or the Mystery Machine) and driven by any of the characters, which you'll need for a variety of missions throughout.

Sadly there doesn't appear to be a co-op options as of yet, so the seven characters and/or vehicles will act as additional bodies that a lone player can switch between as they desire. But that presents an interesting new dynamic that hasn't been seen in toys-to-life games up until this point, so having a RPG-like party to control according to your wishes could prove interesting and fresh. And hey, if you can control Scooby Doo and immediately flip to Wonder Woman, I'm all for it.

It's finally happened: Bethesda has gone toe to toe with Minecraft. The publisher has been toying with in-game map editing tools for its core RPG franchises for some time – Skyrim's Hearthfire expansion allows you to build and decorate houses, on top of a robust physics system that lets you drag objects around willy-nilly – but not ‘til has it handed us more or less a level designer’s power over an area's layout and contents.

In certain parts of the new game, you'll be able to convert objects into component resources such as wood and rubber, then buy and place walls, props and interactive fixtures to form your very own town. What's more, NPCs will come to live in these towns and you'll need to keep them fed, watered, happy, and protected, placing resources such as crops and automated defences to head off raider attacks. OK, so you can't (that we know of) dig into the very terrain, but everything above ground is yours to meddle with.

There are a fair few games with map-editing features on the shop right now, of course, and certain design “trends” have emerged, from the obligatory giant penis effigy to those terrifyingly adept works of urban planning I keep bumping into on Youtube. Here are a few varieties of user-created settlement you're all but guaranteed to encounter at least once in the average Fallout 4 savegame.

Fallout 4's editing toolset includes switches (terminals) that can be hooked up to components such as power generators and signboards to control their behaviour. From the E3 videos, it appears that you can bodge together quite complex sequences of interactions, calling on more advanced gadgets such as laser tripwires and components that all map to the same terminal. My knowledge of programming is admittedly sketchy, but it sounds like you could even create your own analytical engine inside the simulation, following in the footsteps of this from Dwarf Fortress.

Quite why people keep feeling the urge to build computers inside other computers eludes me. True, it's cheaper than buying another laptop, but it's also months of work for a machine that's just about powerful enough to add and subtract. One of these days somebody will build a computer inside a computer inside a computer, and humanity will evaporate in a blaze of meta-textuality.

Or Winterhold. Or Whiterun. Or the Starship Enterprise. Or the DisneyLand castle. Or Lordran. Or the set of Carry On Cleo. Probably all of them, in fact, plus the Los Angeles convention centre (complete with NPCs queueing by flickering TV sets), six thousand casino-style billboard animations of Mario doing non-canonical things to Princess Peach, and the meth lab from Breaking Bad. Lengthy trawls of various Reddit boards have taught me that there is nothing committed level editors enjoy more than transplanting pop culture landmarks between or into games, blurring their DNA in a manner calculated to rouse Twitter's shock and admiration. And annoy the hell out of various copyright lawyers.

Fallout 4's aesthetic poses a bit of an obstacle – it's hard to believe you're living in the Smurf Village when there are 200-year-old shopping trolleys all over, and everything looks like it's made of rat droppings – but I have faith in you, fans of license splicing. On PC, of course, you can look forward to skin and texture mods to help complete the illusion. These will migrate to the Xbox One version, with mod support on PS4 still TBC at the time of writing.

For every 10 half-finished eyesores or giant penis sculptures, there should (we hope) be at least one player who sets out boldly to create something that actually works as a town should. A town in which the arrangement of farms, markets, homesteads and so forth is genuinely reminiscent of the practical and emotional needs of living creatures. A town where morale is always high, where nobody wants for potable water, a bar to lean on or a place to lay their head. A town that can hold off raiders and sustain itself without the player needing to pop back continually to fix up the barricades and ensure all the guards are pointing in the right direction.

A town, moreover, that feels like a plausible part of the game's storyline. Bethesda's tools allow for fine-grained object placement – you might spend half-an-hour moving a single lightbulb around in order to precisely illuminate an arresting tableau. It'll be intriguing to see whether the most ambitious town creators can hint at forgotten backstories as successfully as the game's own designers.

Some will see AI raids on player-owned towns as a nuisance, but look at it this way: you're almost certainly going to kill a lot of people in Fallout 4 regardless. At least in this case they have the courtesy to come to you. And think of the loot! The bottle caps! The unending shrieks of pain and terror from without the walls as you recline on your throne at the centre of a maze of tripwires, turrets, landmines and guard towers – a capricious and uncaring despot, growing fat off the suicidal imbecility of scavenger tribes.

The idea of auto-farming enemies in open world games for XP or items has a long, illustrious history – in particular, Minecraft players have learned to bump off whole armies of mobs by placing spawn points near natural hazards. With any luck, Fallout 4's crafting system will be sophisticated enough to allow creation of . Imagine opening a bridge trapdoor below a raiding party to plunge them into a river of nuclear sewage, which then sweeps dropped items beneath a walkway where they can be safely harvested. Every frontier town should have one! Who knows, perhaps you'll find the corpse of the game's final boss in there.

Bethesda-brand NPCs are characterised by two things. One, facial animations that put you in mind of The Exorcist. And two, an endearing mixture of independent thinking and rampant bloody stupidity. Yes, the average Skyrim resident might sleep in an actual bed at night, sell armour by day and hunt the game's wildlife for sport, but you can also to stop him noticing when you nick his stuff. It's not exactly Deus Ex Machina.

For many, these AI foibles are all part of the fun – hey, what's not to love about tavern-goers who ? - but now imagine a Fallout 4 NPC attempting to navigate a town laid out not by a trained designer but some half-arsed teenager. A smashed labyrinth of doorless rooms and free-standing walls through which crusty residents trundle forever, searching in despair for the crops they're supposed to water, stalls they're supposed to run. Truly pitiful.

Let's say you've just gotten hold of a Fat Man, the returning heavy launcher from Fallout 3. You're itching to try it out on something, but the Fat Man is not a weapon you can fire off just anywhere. Put it this way - it's not the kind of weapon that wounds. Were you playing as an utter villain, kicking the legs out from under civilisation as it struggles to its feet, this wouldn't be a problem. But you've resolved to play as a goddamn do-gooder. You're also a stealth specialist. How on Earth are you going to dig yourself a nice cathartic crater without losing karma and making a mockery of your ninja pretensions?

Ah but wait. There is that rubbish, mostly deserted village you set up the other week, isn't there? The one you filled with custom shop window mannequins, who you gave individual names and backstories, so as to create a cathartic mini-realm of guilt-free violent oppression. So that you could do all kinds of evil stuff to people, without losing your hero rating. Because you’re possibly a bit mad. Perhaps you should pay a visit. The kind of visit that ends about, oh, let's say a hundred metres outside the city limits. It's just a shame Fallout 4 doesn't appear to support the same level of realistic building destruction you'd get in, say, Red Faction: Guerrilla. Still, those mannequin minions will fly.

You can build towns on several sites in Fallout 4. Assuming an only-human level of dedication, at least one of the towns you build is probably going to consist of the bare necessities – a shack with a workbench, a roof turret, a strongbox, and a lonely-looking trader peering at the horizon.

It raises an important question: exactly how punishing are the raiding and town morale aspects? Will players be obliged to think big, fleshing out their settlements to satisfy NPC requirements and head off attacks, or will we be able to throw together the odd homestead purely for the sake of a fast-travel point? If the town-building is too much of a chore, its appeal may be limited - much like maintaining a social life in Grand Theft Auto 4.