REVIEW | LEGO® Batman™: Legacy of the Dark Knight

My journey with LEGO games began back in the PlayStation 2 era with LEGO Indiana Jones and LEGO Batman. But on my Xbox 360 I played many more, such as LEGO Batman 2, LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga, LEGO Harry Potter, LEGO The Lord of the Rings, LEGO The Hobbit, among others. I always enjoyed the LEGO adaptations of these characters and stories, the dumb humour they bring to otherwise serious scenes, and the fun gameplay. I also loved playing through the Batman Arkham games, so much so that I’ve become a Batman fan because of them.

With me being a fan of both Batman and LEGO, seeing this game announced was very exciting. So, how does LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight play? Was it worth the wait? Scroll down your bat-phone or bat-mouse wheel and let’s find out!

Things I liked!

• Look at my shiny new LEGO | LEGO Batman LotDK looks very good despite being a LEGO game. The lighting is very good and reflects properly. The environments are detailed, with graffiti on walls, trash cans, lamp posts, paintings, pinball machines, other cars, civilians, mailboxes, plants, lights, hydrants and antennas, among many other objects around the city, the Batcave, recognisable places from the Batman universe, and the levels themselves. There is an option between fidelity and performance mode, but I didn’t notice any major graphical improvements that would justify using fidelity mode over having a better performance.

• Quick, Alfred, turn on the Bat-speakers! | The Batman movies and video games have always had iconic soundtracks. LEGO Batman LotDK frequently reminds us of these classic themes from the movies, with songs directly from Batman (1989), The Batman (2022), Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, among other great songs, as well as a couple of popular songs featured in movies: Kiss From a Rose by Seal and Partyman by Prince. There is also a streamer-friendly mode that helps content creators avoid getting in trouble for licensed songs playing in the background. The sound effects are great, fitting the Bat-verse well during fights, block destruction, gadget usage, and overall interactions.
  
  
• It’s Bat-accessible | You can choose from three difficulties, with the easiest one being associated with a more traditional LEGO experience, while the other two make the game a bit harder. I chose the medium difficulty and didn’t have much trouble with it. The hardest difficulty has limited lives for most levels and makes stronger enemies more frequent, so if you’re looking for a challenge, you can find it here. There are a total of seventeen languages available for text and nine voiced ones.
  
  You can turn off subtitles if you choose to do so, change their background, turn on closed captions, and enable voice-over icons. You can also adjust how strong aim assist is, change if and when mission markers, player markers, and custom waypoint markers disappear, and adjust text size. HUD elements can be dynamic, only showing up when they’re updated, or always on. The field of view can be changed between 60º and 75º, and you can also make it dynamic, changing it when you’re sprinting or boosting a vehicle.
  
  There are also full-screen effects you can enable or disable, these including Motion Blur, Vignettes, Weather Effects, Repeating Visual Effects, Bloom, and Screen Space Ambient Occlusion. There are, of course, the basic controller options, such as adjusting camera sensitivity, inverting the vertical and horizontal axis, and turning vibration on and off. You can manually remap all controls to make it as comfortable as possible.
  
  
• It’s all in the Bat-family | Unlike from other LEGO entries, you’ll only get to play as seven characters: Jim Gordon, Robin, Nightwing, Batgirl, Catwoman, and Talia Al Ghul. You can only play as Alfred at the very beginning of the game, so he doesn’t exactly count as a playable character. While other LEGO games had dozens to hundreds of characters with limited personality, LEGO Batman focuses on having seven upgradeable characters instead, each exclusive gadgets and different utilities.
  
  Batman has Batarangs for combat and brick destruction; the Batclaw for combat, locomotion, and pulling specific objects; explosive gel directly from the Batman Arkham games; a chemicals analyser minigame; and thermal and UV visions at specific locations.
  
  Catwoman can cut through glass when necessary; scale specific walls; crack safes with a dedicated minigame; use her whip in combat and puzzles; and call for the help of a cat to fit through narrow spaces or stun enemies.
  
  Robin has a rope launcher used for traversal and combat; a Birdarang that can hit up to three targets in sequence; a stick that can pry doors open or be divided into two sticks for combat. Nightwing plays almost identically to Robin, as he is the same person, except that he has shock as an extra effect in puzzles and combat.
  
  Batgirl has a hackarang used to hack numerous things either directly or through a minigame, including towers that reveal collectables around town; she can also deploy a drone that can fly freely and become a perch point to grapple onto and traverse more easily.
  
  Talia can teleport with a smoke bomb, like a ninja, which can be useful in combat or for passing through malfunctioning doors; she also has sleep darts to deal with enemies.
  
  
• Which Bat-suit will you choose today, sir? | Batman wouldn’t be Batman without his iconic Bat-suits, and his partners are no different. That’s why there are a total of one hundred and one suits available to be unlocked for the entire Bat-family, ranging from movie suits, comic suits, animation suits, and even ones directly from the Batman Arkham series. There are also thirty vehicles to unlock, including plenty of Batmobiles, a few vehicles for Robin, and a few vehicles for Batgirl as well, all themed after movies and even changing how boosting works with them accordingly.
  
  
• A modified Arkham combat and traversal | There are many inspirations from the Batman Arkham games in the gameplay of LEGO Batman LotDK. There is stealth as an optional gameplay mechanic, where you can instantly defeat regular enemies with a takedown, with various animations such as throwing a cake in an enemy’s face, tying a bat-balloon to them, throwing them upward, or slapping them with a fish, among other fun variants.
  
  You can crawl through vents, sometimes in first person and other times in third person, shimmy across ledges, climb, and traverse with the Batclaw. The combat also works similarly, with dodging, countering, punching, building up combos, using gadgets mid-combo, and powerful attacks that can dispose of weak enemies quickly or deal massive damage to big enemies.
  
  You gain the ability to glide, though you don’t control its verticality as well as in the Arkham games, but it works very similarly, and you can even grapple and continue gliding without stopping. Security cameras and drones that detect you are also present, with cameras that can be temporarily disabled with a Batarang, but also armoured ones that you have to avoid. The drones can be hacked so that they do not detect you. In the credits, we can see that Rocksteady was involved in the game’s development, which explains all the inspirations it takes from the Batman Arkham games.
  
  
• To the Batcave! | The Batcave progresses slowly at the beginning of the game, with Alfred doing the hard work himself, but later on, you will be the one to manually expand it. There are some spots where you can decorate freely with various objects and furniture you already own, ranging from Batman-related items to regular ones, giving your personal touch. There is an area to select and buy vehicles, not just the Batmobiles but also vehicles for Robin and Batgirl.
  
  There is also an area where you can see and choose from available suits for the entire Bat-family. These customisations can also be easily switched in the menus at any time. You can also check your progress on challenges in a specific area. If you manage to complete all challenges, you’ll complete a picture and possibly gain even more rewards. You’ll also see a shop there, which I will go into detail in another topic.
  
  
• Meaningful Upgrades | Remember golden bricks? Those are skill points here. They can be used to upgrade your combat and exploration capabilities, including stud multipliers. You can also upgrade all gadgets in specific places with Wayne Tech you can collect in levels and around town, having alternate versions of said gadgets as upgrade options, as well as some very interesting and useful abilities, such as a bat swarm by using your focus bar with your batarang, which fills up in combat and even in exploration if you level it up enough.
  
  
• It’s a lively Gotham out there | There is an open world with four different areas of Gotham: The Tricorner, North, South, and Central islands, as well as a fully explorable Batcave. You’ll be gliding and driving around town quite a bit, and while doing so, you’ll be able to unlock fast-travel points, collect the Riddler’s and the Cluemaster’s boxes around town by completing their puzzles, hack towers, collecting Wayne Tech caches for upgrades, collecting studs for buying furniture, suits, and Batmobiles, collecting clues and locating criminals for the GCPD, finding animals that escaped from the zoo, destroying Poison Ivy’s mutant plants, collecting trophies, collecting bat-symbols, complete AR training missions much like in the Batman Arkham games, as well as crimes happening around you, which you can learn about through the police radio.
  
  
• A treat for Batman fans | LEGO Batman LotDK is a lot more than just another LEGO game. It encapsulates everything about the characters and stories we love so much, adding its LEGO humour and fun to it. It recaps what happens with Bruce Wayne, from his tragedy as a kid to his training in the League of Shadows and becoming Batman. All of this while recreating scenes from movies, going through their stories, and reminding us of the great, the good, and the bad adaptations as well. The adaptations I could recognise that were included in the story here are: Batman Begins, The Batman (2022), Batman (1989), Batman Returns, Batman Forever, Batman: The Animated Series, Batman and Robin, The Dark Knight, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and The Dark Knight Rises. All of them were put in a way that makes sense continuity-wise, divided into five chapters, and even include an original plot at the end, which was awesome to see.
  
  
• The villains of Gotham | Enemy variants consist of unarmed melee, armed melee, pistol-wielding, shotgun-wielding, machine-gun-wielding, sword-wielding, shield-wielding, rocket-launcher-wielding, giant melee, giant armoured and shielded melee, as well as a few unique ones, like explosive penguins and plants. There are plenty of unique bosses that work in various ways, like Poison Ivy controlling a giant plant that shoots explosive pods, spikes the ground while forcing you to move, among other mechanics. You’ll also encounter other villains, not always in boss fights, such as the Condiment King, Two-Face, the Joker, Bane, the Penguin, Mr. Freeze, Black Mask, Ra’s al Ghul, Solomon Grundy, Firefly, and a few other villains that I’ll leave as surprises for you folks.
  
  
• A different kind of LEGO | LEGO Batman LotDK changes the LEGO formula a bit. For instance, red bricks seem to only change the colours of suits, as they can be applied to them if you want to. There are no red bricks for x2, x3, etc., stud multipliers to be acquired; what you have in their place is a multiplier that can be upgraded to x4, which goes up as you collect more studs in a row, forcing you to break a lot of LEGO objects and quickly move before going for that shiny purple stud that is worth 10k with no multipliers. You can also upgrade pickup distance, but it doesn’t make as big a difference as the stud magnet did in previous entries. Thankfully, it still has local multiplayer just like previous LEGO games, because Batman is never alone here.
  
• Look menacing, Batman | There is a photo mode available, where you can position your camera at your leisure, move it up or down, zoom in and out and rotate. It’s not very complex and it doesn’t have character poses or filters, but it’s still a nice touch.
  
• He’s saying the thing! | Voice actors do a pretty good job of portraying their respective characters while mixing in some LEGO humour in iconic scenes and with iconic phrases. Batman sounds like he’s forcing his voice to be serious and powerful, except when he gets emotional about something funny, which only happened a few times, but was a really nice touch. The red brick stops the famous Bane line about breaking Batman in The Dark Knight Rises, when he steps on it and hurts himself, as you can see below.

Mixed & disliked!

• It’s not all a Kiss From a Rose after all | I did have some bugs happen to me, like an enemie’s detection rate being bugged once, with him looking in my direction without seeing me and the question mark not disappearing from the top of his head; Catwoman having a permanent stun effect above her head, only disappearing after I completed the level; and at the very last level, a closed caption saying [Enemy alerted] got stuck on screen and even doubled down when I deactivated security cameras through a terminal. And let’s talk about the elephant in the room: the fidelity mode runs very poorly, constantly dipping under 30fps with better effects that I didn’t miss at all while playing the game smoothly at what seemed to be 60fps in performance mode.

How long did I play the review before publishing? 14 Hours
How long to beat the story? 13h-15 Hours
How many Achievements did I earn before publishing? 30/52 OR 480/1000G
How long to achieve 1000G | 25+ Hours
You’ll love this game if you like these | LEGO Batman, LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, Batman: Arkham City.

CONCLUSION

Score: 95/100

LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is a love letter to the character, making any Batman fan very happy. It changes the LEGO formula a bit by focusing on the Bat-family instead of having many playable characters, and it feels like a spiritual successor to the Batman Arkham games. I cannot recommend it enough, despite the few issues present.

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if you want to see it in action, here is some co-op splitscreen gameplay recorded from the opening level: