LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, from what we played at the game’s preview event in LA, is swinging for the fences (does that count as a bat pun or is it one step removed?). We had a couple hours to play the game (at an elaborate Batcave PC setup, seen below), after which we were given the opportunity to speak with Jonathan Smith, Head of Production at TT Games. To put it in the most buzzword-y way possible, this upcoming entry in the LEGO Batman franchise is the classic comedic tone of the LEGO games you know and love, married with the combo-based brawling and open world of the Arkham games. Does it work? Short answer: yes. Long answer: I can’t say for sure, since two hours with the game wasn’t enough to make a proper judgment on the game’s overall quality. What little I did get to play, though, was pure chaotic LEGO fun.
We were given access to three different saves, each taking us through a level in some of the game’s earlier chapters. After having completed the levels, we were free to roam around Gotham, grappling from building to building and completing side activities to our hearts’ content. The first level immediately cemented itself as one of my favourites in any LEGO game, period. Batman is infiltrating Carmine Falcone’s criminal base of operations, and is surprised to find that Falcone may be more of a softie than he lets on. Batman stumbles upon Carmine’s House of Fun, complete with a ball pit, bouncy castle, tunnels… name a play structure you loved as a kid, Carmine has provided it here for his goons. I’ve never felt so morally conflicted while taking out ostensibly evil baddies; they just wanna play!
You have a couple options for approach in this section, one being simplistic but satisfying stealth. It functions much like it did in the Arkham games, but utilizes the signature LEGO game charm by implementing an almost unreasonable amount of unique takedown animations. These kinds of details stick out and emphasize just how much fun the devs must have had while developing the game. I didn’t get the chance to perform any takedowns from above, but I’m sure those are filled with creative animations as well.
Once you’re caught and a fight is inevitable, the Arkham-ness rears its head. When I say this combat feels like the Arkham games, I mean it’s a near carbon copy. “For a player, we knew this was going to be a combat game; it was one of the pillars of what we wanted to achieve,” says Jonathan. My muscle memory from playing Arkham Knight 10+ years ago immediately kicked back in, and I was performing lengthy combos in no time at all. I even went so far as to crank the difficulty up; that’s how comfortable I immediately felt. The enemy variety was slim and the combat options were scant in the beginning, but a later glimpse at the various upgrades have me excited for what combat will look like with a fully decked out Dark Knight et al.
One of the game’s more controversial changes from the traditional LEGO game formula is its extreme stripping-back of its playable characters, reducing your options to just a handful of Batman heroes. I was able to play as Batman, Robin, Gordon, and Catwoman (Nightwing and Talia Al Ghul are also playable), and it quickly became clear that this decision was the right one. Each character comes equipped with entirely different gear and separate skill trees that offer them a different moveset, enabling more freedom than even the Arkham games allowed for. I had to rewire my brain at a certain point; this is less a LEGO game with a soupçon of Arkham sprinkled in, and more of an Arkham game that happens to be built out of LEGO.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the game’s open world: a dark, neon-soaked Gotham filled to the brim with things to do. Riddler trophies make a return, alongside gliding challenges, races, wrangling zoo animals, stopping random crimes, and more. While Gotham itself is absolutely gorgeous, this is the only portion of the preview that left me with some trepidation. I was able to peruse Gotham on my own for about a half hour, and within that span I felt like, despite the breadth of content on offer, I had seen nearly all I had to see. Each activity takes very little time, and no instance of an activity felt meaningfully different from another.
The puzzles offered the most in terms of variation – and I’m excited to try to solve all of the Riddler’s enigmas – but other activities languished in repetition. This isn’t helped by the fact that gliding feels oddly slow; I wasn’t given a full tutorial so perhaps I was missing a crucial aspect of the controls, but it was rather awkward to have to cancel out of a glide to descend quickly in the air. Grappling comes with its own jankiness, often resulting in you grappling into the bottom of a bridge or the side of a building you had no intention of bashing into. Considering how good grappling and gliding feel in every Arkham game, this is the only facet in which LotDK fell noticeably short.
The ambitious new Batcave (the game one, not the real one) made for an overwhelming first impression. The team was obviously extremely excited for us to explore it, and for good reason. It serves as a hub area, packed with customizables - 100 suits are in the game, according to Smith, alongside plenty of vehicles to smash all of Gotham’s streetlights and mailboxes with. I only saw hints of this, but parts of the cave are even customizable with purchasable furniture and the like. To get a sense of the scale of the Batcave, I found a Minikit hidden beneath a catwalk and was informed that there were a total of 10 to be found in the area. I was able to find a total of 2. Obviously the Batcave holds many more secrets than my short playtime allowed me to be privy to.
From what little of the narrative I was able to glean, TT have done a great job of spinning their own, entirely new Bat-yarn. While the game does borrow heavily from different elements of the Batman iterations we’re all familiar with, this is a new story focusing on a young Bruce, alongside his trusty side-Dick, Robin. Smith and the team are dedicated to doing Robin justice in particular: “in the past, Robin's been portrayed as really whiny and annoying. People think he's an embarrassing leftover from an earlier decade. But we love Nightwing, we love Robin. Robin is badass.” This is a LEGO game, though, which means a high sight-gag per minute ratio and a tone closer to that of the 60s TV show than to Matt Reeves’ most recent kick at the can. So far, the incessant slapstick has not gotten on my nerves in the slightest; the writing is surprisingly clever and feels properly in-character for our heroes and villains even at its most heightened.
The impromptu rhythm game dance sequence is the perfect introduction to let you know that, despite this ostensibly being about the legacy of the Dark Knight, the game is not sacrificing a single ounce of its comedic soul. According to Smith, “The Dark Knight Trilogy is the iteration we pulled from the most – It has a beginning, middle and end. But there's a lot of other Batman in the game. We thought it was going to be impossible to do, to insert all these different iterations. But, with the Lego veneer, it allowed us to show it as Batman growing and developing. He becomes these different iterations of himself.” When it came to restrictions, Smith says the team had next to none, working closely with DC to bounce ideas back and forth.
As an avid LEGO collector myself, I’ve always been curious about the process of designing the brick-built models in-game. I was delighted to hear from Jonathan that care was taken to make sure each build is anatomically possible in the real world: “We have Lego artists who have drawers and drawers of Lego parts and bits, and quite often they love to build it in the physical reality before they actually make it. We have tons of models from this game and past [ones] in the office. Obviously, they then make them all digitally, but they're really finicky about making sure it all fits for real.”
As for the event itself? I’ll let the photos do the talking. It was an impressive tribute to every mainline version of the Bat, almost like a mini Batman museum featuring real props and costumes from the movies. But don’t eat the Bat-burger. I controversial to say that hamburger buns should not be charcoal black, nor should they taste how they look if they are said shade.
You can look forward to our review of LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight when it releases May 22 for all major platforms.
