LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight review

TT Games really, really, really, really, really loves Batman. Every inch of LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is dedicated to Batman reverence; Batmen old and Batmen young, Batmen weird and Batmen dumb. I wouldn’t quite consider myself a man of the Batman-ic faith, yet I can’t help but feel nostalgia even for the references I don’t get. There was a time in my life when The Dark Knight Rises (yes, Rises) was my favourite movie of all time, and though those days are long behind me, this game put me right back in that headspace. For all the negatives I’ll go on to describe in this review, know that almost all of them are offset by the sheer passion for Batman that TT Games so shamelessly displays. This game is a filthy, lustful love letter to the Caped Crusader, and that’s what makes it great.

As mentioned in my preview, LotDK is, gameplay-wise at least, a smooth combination of traditional LEGO games and Warner Bros.’ Arkham trilogy — shockingly, taking far more from the Arkham games. Everything from the combo-based brawls to the grapple-and-glide traversal through an open world Gotham feel nearly 1:1 with their Arkham inspiration, albeit with a much cutesier tone. If you’re one of the many, many people lamenting the fact that we got that Suicide Squad game rather than a new entry in the Arkham franchise, this may just tide you over until…well, until Rocksteady is out of developer jail and ready to make good games again. 

The combat offers a surprising amount of depth; its more cartoony vibe allows for far more creative uses of the Bat-cast’s toolbelts. You can play as one of six characters, introduced slowly over the game’s six chapters: Batman himself, Jim Gordon, Robin (and Nightwing, a very slight variant), Catwoman, Batgirl, and Talia Al-Ghul. Each character has two unique gadgets, used for both puzzle-solving and for taking out bad guys. Though not hugely complex on an individual level, the optionality makes for combat that doesn’t get stale over the course of the game’s 10-ish hour main story. Each character has a short but sweet upgrade tree, with some pretty dazzling evolutions of the gadgets’ base functionalities (I especially love Batman’s swarm of cute LEGO bats, and Jim Gordon’s iconic Ricochet Gun™ that definitely breaches the Geneva Convention). Stealth is also an option in some situations, but I found it to be far more fun to alert the guards immediately. Though sneaking is somewhat satisfying, I’ll take the approach that allows me to use the Ricochet Gun™ to my heart’s content, thank you very much.

A lack of enemy variety hinders the combat a little, though the Arkham games suffered from largely the same issue. There’s only so many types of dudes you can punch, I suppose. Bosses were also underwhelming and few and far between; there’s an intangible lack of tension in them that has nothing to do with the game’s low difficulty (on normal). I understand that this is ostensibly a game made for children, but the pacing of these supposedly climactic fights often felt plodding, like I was just waiting for repetitive strings of easy to dodge attacks. Only the Poison Ivy fight stood out as particularly creative; it’s a little clearer as to why they gave us that one to play through at the preview event. 

Unchanged is the level structure inextricable from the LEGO game formula. Each has a plethora of secrets and collectibles to hunt, thankfully none of which require you to go back and replay missions as different characters. This is often where LotDK shines most — each of the game’s major missions are the game’s best forms of creative expression outside the existing historical Batman framework. Areas like Falcone’s House of Fun and the museum heist aren’t based on any existing Batman canon (as far as I know), but manage to stand out among a sea of references and send-ups. Punching down every sculpture in the museum in search of studs that I’ll end up doing nothing with feels incredible, to boot. 

When you’re not doing story missions, LotDK has an ungodly amount of Ubisoft™ map markers for you to check off. You’ll be asked to save escaped zoo animals, perform flying/driving/fighting trials, solve Riddler AND Cluemaster puzzles, hack radio towers, unlock fast travel points, plant plants, destroy plants, collect collectibles, cat-burgle apartments…it’s as exhausting to do as it is to list. Only the (indistinguishable) Riddler/Cluemaster content offers any sort of variety, with some being more mentally taxing than I expected (or I’m just dumb). The other side activities aren’t worth more than a passing glance, offering largely the same experience whether it’s your first time trial or your 30th. 100%ing this game will be a chore, and a chore that I have absolutely no interest in tackling. No, not even to find out what happens when you solve all the puzzles. Though I am curious enough that I’ll be looking up YouTube videos of what happens as people have done so.

Traversal through Gotham City is better than I gave it credit for in the preview. The city itself is incredible: Gotham feels dark and crime-ridden without feeling bleak; this is still a silly LEGO game, after all. Every fake ad, every building, every sign is some kind of reference to obscure Batman media, and will surely have a million little Easter eggs for fans more enlightened than I to appreciate. Moving through the city, be it through the sky or in the Batmobile (or Tumbler or SWAT vehicle or Robin-cycle) feels rapid and slick, with the grapple only occasionally catching you in an awkward, slightly glitchy spot. Vehicles are comically fast and deadly; it’s almost impossible not to rack up an innocent kill count after only minutes of joy-riding through the bustling city streets. In Arkham Knight they explained all the vehicular murdern’ts as the manslaughterees being harmlessly (or, at least, not fatally) electrocuted, but there’s no such attempt at suspending your disbelief here — you’re just mowing them down. Canon be damned. All but LEGO gore galore. 

Speaking of canon, LotDK loves to play with it. A lot. The game’s story feels like it was authored by the most well-read 14 year-old Batman fan smashing all his favourite Batman minifigs together — and I say this with as much respect as I do disdain. At its best, LotDK takes its golden opportunity to blend iterations of Batman to create brilliant moments of intertwined tales. Chapter 5 is the game’s most obvious narrative peak: Batman travels to Arkham to question Joker in a near carbon copy of the opening of Arkham Asylum, but quickly subverts that by switching to a hilarious spoof of the interrogation scene in The Dark Knight…and then we get an Arkham prison break mixed with a Scarecrow hallucination fight, all contained within a sub-30 minute mission. It’s the kind of sequence that could only come from a team given full creative freedom to pull from every source imaginable, and a team with the writing chops to execute such bold ideas.

But then there are the third and fourth chapters, which feel like filler despite accounting for 1/3 of the story mode’s runtime. They have you running about Gotham doing busywork, often involving mildly entertaining minor villains, and then offer a more substantial mission to introduce (and subsequently forget about) a more popular villain at the end — Poison Ivy and Mr. Freeze (yes, doing a mediocre Arnold impression and yes, doing more played out ironic ice puns), respectively. The game’s narrative structure feels at odds with itself, oscillating between frenetic low-stakes Saturday morning cartoon antics and attempts at a vague overarching plot. The result is a jumbled up mess with far more ideas than it knows what to do with. It sometimes seems like entire sections have been excised from the script — the Joker is arrested in Chapter 2, but Batman has to stop him from robbing a bank in a later chapter? Not to mention the fact that the first and last chapters contain approximately 95% of the game’s relevant plot beats. Even the final chapter has trouble focusing on its own advantages, relegating Matt Berry’s phenomenal Bane performance to mere minutes of screentime. 

Perhaps my expectations were too high. I wanted a celebration of Batman’s history, but the plot boils down to The Dark Knight trilogy with a smattering of references to others thrown in for good measure. It’s part missed opportunity to create something new and interesting, and part turn-your-brain-off good ol’ LEGO game parodical fun. When the writing is good, it goes toe-to-toe with The LEGO Batman Movie’s shockingly high quality and high frequency jokes, and when it’s bad, it’s deeply forgettable. I kept having to remind myself that I shouldn’t be holding this game to such a high standard — LEGO games have never been known for their narrative prowess — and yet I couldn’t help but feel bothered by the strange gulf between the game’s best and worst moments. The bones of greatness were right there, which makes it all the more frustrating that they were so often hidden away in favour of frivolous, checklist-y villain appearances.

To briefly touch on the game’s technical state — in a word, it’s fine. I experienced one crash and some very rare frame dips on PS5, but the game largely ran at a fluid 60fps, dropping to a steady 30fps in split screen co-op (limited to 2 players, split or online). Where the game sees more immersion-shattering issues is in its general bugginess. Nothing major ever happened during my playthrough, but it was rare for me to get through a mission without experiencing at least one instance of awkward clipping, or a faulty spawn point that forced me to die multiple times in a row, or janky NPC/enemy behaviour. A day-one patch could fix some of these issues, but my guess is that a few updates will be needed before all the kinks are worked out. 

Would it be strange to say, after all I’ve criticized, that this is probably the best LEGO game? And does it make it even weirder considering this one bucks traditional LEGO gameplay in favour of lifting a whole other (ostensibly dead) franchise’s structure? There’s a lot in LotDK that makes it easy to…well, not love, but really really like, and its almost obsessive adoration for grown men dressed as bats is chief among them. You may not want to spend any extra time clearing out a near-endless map of samey activities, but the main story’s highlights and the city itself are well worth the price of admission. Batman begin