LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight Review

I believe its safe to say that if you asked most gamers about the LEGO games they played, it would be Star Wars and Batman. They were the pillars of TT Games LEGO output in the 2000s with a large output across all the consoles at the time, so it makes sense that after The Skywalker Saga evolved the Star Wars games, Batman would be next. For better and worse that’s what this is, an evolution of the LEGO Batman games that so many of us played. Playing through this game felt like playing a love letter to all things Batman media over the last almost 90 years with references to the movies, comics, shows, and the beloved Arkham games. Throwing it all together to make the “Ultimate Batman Story” seems like a good idea, but after almost 14 hours in the story and about 5 in the post game, it left me with a bit of a mixed feeling.

Lets start with the story of the game, it decides to weave and put together all of the Batman movies into its own story by putting you into the costumes, vehicles, and recreations of the scenes from those movies in each chapter. The game starts with an almost hour long prologue where you just play as Bruce Wayne before sending up the recent Robert Pattinson Batman movie, transitioning into 1989, ‘66, Batman and Robin, and Nolan’s movies. the odd mix of tones and characters from the movies are fun, but at some point it just started to feel a little hollow as they wanted to really squeeze every reference they could into the game. As a Batman fan most of these hit with me great, however at moments it started to bore me a bit. Overall the story was enjoyable, I think I just hoped for more.

Now lets talk the characters and and combat in the game. Unlike most LEGO games, this doesn’t have a hundred different characters. It has a focus on 7 playable characters with 2 of them, Robin and Nightwing, having very little difference in gameplay. While i enjoyed having the simple Arkham style combat here, it starts to lack and show it weakness as you don’t have the free flowing visuals from those games, instead you are a brick Batman throwing mainly punches while waves of 30 henchmen are sent at you for fodder and it really just becomes numbingly bland to play after 10 hours of having nothing visually to latch onto. The idea of making a LEGO Arkham game is nice but in execution it just didn’t land for me like i was hoping it would. I did love each of the characters having a different style gadget, my only complaint there is that i wish their takedowns weren’t repeated between all of them. I can only see a bad guy smacked with a Fish so many times.

Overall I think this game has great performances from the voice cast and for Batman fans it will be everything that they wanted out of it. I think the cracks started to show as it overstayed its welcome and and the luster of a “new Arkham” game wore off to show its an okay LEGO game that did abandon a lot of the collectable stuff that fans loved and adored from these games for fan service of the Arkham games. Its not a bad game, instead it feels like a game confusingly stuck between the 2 style of games.

WHAT I LIKED

• It’s a love letter to all things Batman, i grew up on so many references that are in this game.
• The Music is fantastic
• The Voice Acting for everyone is top notch across the board
• That Arkham combat is so much fun to play
• Fun and creative puzzles

WHAT I DIDNT LIKE

• The open world bombards you with constant crimes happening that it can get annoying.
• Visually the combat and Takedowns get so repetitive its not as fun to play and can feel boring when a 2nd wave of 20 brick dudes are just getting punched.
• The Prologue before you are batman is too long
• The Story is too long and its reliance on previous Batman IP hurts its own story.