Of all the things I've come to expect from the many Lego games I've played over the years, nuanced stealth is not one of them. So when I realized that I was running out of time in my Gamescom demo of Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight because I was spending too long slowly picking off bad guys from the shadows, I was pleasantly surprised to find I'd stumbled upon a very different game to the one I was expecting.
The first and most obvious comparison that Legacy of the Dark Knight drew was towards the Arkham games. Still the best Batman games you can get your hands on, the series' DNA is all over this Lego homage's combat. Stealth takedowns let you dispatch a goon before zipping back up to the relative safety of its surprisingly vertical levels. Hit counters let you chain together huge combos, dodging projectiles or countering incoming hits as you juggle aggro between a crowd of bad guys. It's a more complex approach to fighting that's still relatively new to these Lego games, and while it's obviously lacking the weight that Rocksteady is known for, there's depth far beyond what I was expecting.
While ties to Arkham are clear, developer TT Games has been quick to remind players that this is a Batman game that draws from decades of Batman history. Some of those references are clearly newer than others: while exploring the streets of Gotham I took to the road behind the wheel of the iconic Tumbler, while a shot from the trailer is clearly a mashup of 2022's The Batman and Danny Devito's take on The Penguin from 30 years earlier. But my demo dredged up Batman history from even earlier than that with its focus on the Red Hood Gang from Watchmen creator Alan Moore's iconic The Killing Joke graphic novel. Jonathan Smith, strategic director at TT Games, explains to me that Legacy of the Dark Knight is an attempt to pull an original story out of all these decades of Batman history - an attempt that should eventually make for a wholly unique experience.
Bricked up
While inspiration is being drawn from all over Batman's legacy, the same is less true of Lego. Legacy of the Dark Knight is still a Lego game at its core - if you've played any one of TT Games' two dozen Lego releases over the past 20 years, you'll be familiar with many of its main mechanics. You'll still be smashing things apart to create brand new things, collecting studs to spend on cosmetics, swapping between different characters with new skills and blasting bad guys into the constituent minifig pieces. This is a family-friendly, largely sanitized take on Batman, with plenty of TT's quippy, slapstick humor woven in.
But elsewhere Legacy of the Dark Knight is more complex than you might think of a Lego game. Its version of Gotham is sprawling, dark, and extremely tall, perfect for a Bat trying to hide among the shadows before picking off some random gang member on the streets below. It's a lot of fun to explore, Batman throwing out his cape to ride air currents between buildings, dive-bombing onto bad guys to start fights - or end them by chasing down in-progress crimes on the police scanner. It's a much denser take on Gotham than I expected, but it's also filled with puzzles and collectibles that should keep the Lego games' platinum-chasing fans satisfied for hours. The Riddler puzzles do return, but you'll be glad to know they don't seem quite as terrifyingly enigmatic as they did in the original Lego Batman games.
It's an interesting combination - on the one hand, this feels like a Lego game, with everything that's come to mean over 20 years. On the other, it's a more complex, mature version of that experience that loses none of what makes those special and adds plenty. Smith tells me that TT Games aims to make sure that players' expectations are met in its version of Gotham, whether that be in taking to the streets in the batmobile, beating down bad guys in its Arkham-inspired combat, or aura-farming atop a skyscraper in the search for another puzzle. Legacy of the Dark Knight is a Lego game, but it's also a Batman game, and it straddles both aspects of its source material more effectively than any other Lego game from the past 20 years.
Check out our list of the best Lego games.
