The first new Lego movie tie-in for four years is also the first proper Batman game in over a decade, with a loving homage to the movies, comics, and video games.
There’s no clearer sign of how much longer big budget games take to make nowadays than the current state of the Lego movie tie-ins. Back in the Xbox 360 era, and early into last generation, there were often two new games released every year, famed for their fun co-op and endless bugs – the downside of producing games so quickly, amid reports of intense crunch periods.
Things have gone from one extreme to the other and it’s now four years since Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. Long-term developer Traveller’s Tales is once again at the wheel and while this isn’t really doing anything new (this is the fourth standalone Lego Batman game, and he’s been in three others) but it’s slickly made and the contrivance of the story is weird enough that it’s interesting in its own right.
The premise is neither entirely original nor a direct adaptation. Instead, it’s an amalgam of many different versions of Batman, primarily the movies, but also TV, animated, comic books, and other video games. The opening few minutes of the intro manages to encompass elements of The Batman, The Animated Series, and Tim Burton’s 1989 movie, making knowing calls to scenes and lines of dialogue but blending them all together as if they were one continuity.
The story is an odd idea and, as you can imagine, there are a lot of things that are left out, as the game tries to keep everything family friendly and juggle multiple sources with very different tones. It doesn’t always work, especially as it means you end up with some implausible co-op partners (most of the first third of the game involves only Commissioner Gordon and Catwoman) but the developer’s obvious love for the source material frequently saves it.
The game tackles the movies in more or less chronological order but often running the plots of multiple films by the same director concurrently. So, after a length sequence riffing on The Killing Joke, the Jack Nicholson Joker makes it all the way to the end of the Batman/Batman Returns levels, before inexplicably transforming into Heath Ledger, ready for later in the game.
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Despite all the variant costumes there are only seven unique playable characters, each with very different special abilities. The problem with taking the movies as the lead is that Robin only appears in two of them, and Nightwing not at all, but the game relies on comic book and animated series references to fill in the gaps, especially in terms of wackier villains, such as Condiment King and a version of Kite Man influenced by the Harley Quinn show.
On a broader level, the game plays exactly as you would expect if you’ve ever come across a Lego movie tie-in before. There’s a large open world version of Gotham City, filled with secrets and side missions, but most of the actual story takes place in separate one-off levels.
That’s usually how Lego games work but it’s also essentially the same as Arkham City and Arkham Knight, which this is clearly positioning itself as a sort of sister title to. Even the layout of Gotham is similar, while the city is littered with Riddler (and his new rival Cluemaster) puzzles, and gliding around and grappling off buildings works in an all but identical way. Even though it’s a Lego game there’s a lot of stealth and while it’s purposefully simplistic, if you’re seen it will mean a lot more enemies to deal with than you would have had otherwise.
Although Lego Batman rarely forces you to do stealth it does recreate a version of the predator encounters from the Arkham games, complete with jumping down from an overhead ledge to dispatch a bad guy and then jumping back up again. You can also hide under vents and stalk enemies from there, which is also how the game likes to hide a lot of its secret collectibles.
You can also drive a wide variety of different Batmobiles and other vehicles around Gotham, most of which are a lot more fun than the thrice cursed one from Arkham Knight. Where Lego Batman is less impressive, though, is in terms of the combat, even though that’s also clearly trying to be as similar to Arkham Knight as is feasible.
You can unlock new skills and weapon abilities, but you never get combos quite like Arkham, even if it’s surprising to put so much emphasis on dodges and counters in a game aimed at kids. You have to jump over enemies with shields or dodge around those with stun batons but at the end of the day there’s still only one attack button. Crowd management, a key component of the Arkham games, does become more of an issue on the higher difficulty levels, but it’s rarely a concern on the default.
A lot of effort has gone into delineating the three difficulty modes, all of which are available from the start, and Traveller’s Tales deserves a lot of praise for that. It is genuinely quite hard on the highest, when more dangerous goons appear much more frequently, but even so we were far more invested in finding all the secrets and seeing what bizarre story and character mash-up came next.
Inevitably, the game is not nearly as funny as the actual Lego Batman Movie and Batman himself is, as is often the case in less complex narratives, a bit of a non-character. However, the others are often fun, especially Catwoman, and there are a lot of subtle indications that Traveller’s Tales is British, from a reference to Test Card F to what we’re convinced is a nod towards The Day Today’s Bomb Dogs episode.
The vast majority of jokes aimed at children are someone falling over or an animal doing something unexpected, but there’s also lots of random pop culture references for adults, from American Psycho to Karate Kid. Some of them feel a bit forced but kudos to whoever came up with the ‘For the emperor!’ line during the Penguin boss fight, because we were chortling about that for ages afterwards.
Even on your own (you don’t need to play any of it in co-op if you don’t want to) this is a charming and surprisingly unpredictable adventure, but with a friend or relative it really comes into its own, as an easy-going open world farce that can steal multiple hours of your time without you ever noticing. It doesn’t do anything new for Lego, Batman, or Lego Batman but you’d have to really hate the character, or your friends, not to get at least some enjoyment out if it.
Lego Batman: Legacy Of The Dark Knight review summary
In Short: The closest thing to a new Batman: Arkham game there’ll be for many years and a great co-op adventure in its own right, that somehow manages to be unpredictable all the way through.
Pros: More complex action than previous Lego games, with very different character abilities and a mountain of hidden secrets and side quests. Unusual story approach makes the game feel surprisingly fresh, despite the endless homages.
Cons: The game’s not doing much that any previous Lego Batman game didn’t and the gameplay homages to Arkham Knight come undone in terms of the combat. Not all of the story mash-ups work.
Score: 8/10
Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC
Price: £59.99
Publisher: Warner Bros. Games
Developer: Traveller’s Tales
Release Date: 21st May 2016 (Switch 2 TBC 2026)
Age Rating: 7
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