Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight review: "Arkham flavor combines with Lego comedy better than I expected, making for a true Bat-Celebration"

Every Batman video game that comes out for the rest of eternity will be measured against the Arkham titles, and Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight knows it. Rather than try to reinvent the Batwheel, however, Legacy of the Dark Knight just… lifts as much as possible and drops it into a Lego skin from combat to the open world to certain story elements, and more. And it really, really works.

The fact that it so clearly and heavily borrows from the Arkham games aside, Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight does plenty to also set itself apart. With half a dozen playable characters, each with their own unique weapons, skills, and abilities, combat is as varied as it is fluid. Nightwing's electrified gadgets are a personal favorite, though the upgraded Batman ability that lets him toss three Batarangs at once is easily the most used tool in my arsenal.

I'm Batman

The game does a good job of making you want to use the varied characters and gadgets while also mechanically encouraging you to do so by the simple fact that certain puzzles require specific folks. Need to hack a gadget? Batgirl needs to swap in. Glass to cut? Hello, Catwoman. Something to pry open? Welcome to the party, Robin.

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Like the straightforward skill progression – basically, you get one new skill "brick" per mission to spend – characters unlock as you complete more of the story. Each new character more or less corresponds to a specific chapter of the game, and you spend those missions working directly with them to learn how they function as playable characters in addition to how they fit into the larger Batman narrative that's being constructed brick by Lego brick.

Maybe the biggest promise that Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight made was the concept that it would somehow manage to thread the needle to tell a cohesive story out of decades and decades worth of Batman stories from movies to comics to TV to video games. I'd been a bit worried about how it would accomplish such a herculean task, something nobody would have expected it to do before the developers planted their collective feet on the ground and said it, but it honestly nails it.

Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight somehow manages to stitch together everything from Batman Begins to Knightfall to Arkham Asylum to Batman: The Animated Series into a single, cohesive tale.

That, of course, requires some squeezing and sanding of edges, and given it's a Lego game ostensibly aimed at children it doesn't go as dark as the source material, but it's shocking just how much it manages to cram into the 16 hours or so it takes to complete the narrative.

Not that everything gets the same billing, mind you, and Legacy of the Dark Knight does fill in whatever gaps or missing connective tissue while handwaving other elements. The Snyder films, notably, are largely relegated to some references and (unless I'm mistaken) suits, but then those were not exactly "Batman" movies so much as movies that also had Batman in them. That said, the game makes more than one "Martha" goof, so, you know, representation.

Sidekickin' it

If there's one element that's lacking in Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, it's probably that the game limits itself to local co-op only. It's easy enough for a second player to drop in and drop out at the push of a few buttons, but there's no online functionality here – which is a shame since it does seem to be built from the ground up for a second player. It's all well and good to have someone next to you on the couch, and I can confirm that kids enjoy exactly this, but it does eat into screen real estate when you're sharing one screen split in half down the middle.

The complaint I expected to have before playing Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight has instead turned into a strength now that I've spent over a dozen hours in it. Any open world game inevitably makes me sigh when I see the size of the map and then the giant number of different optional objectives littered across it. Legacy of the Dark Knight manages to dodge out of the way of this problem by simply not bothering to put them on there initially.

Unless I'm sorely mistaken and missed something fundamental, there's no minimap in Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, which means swapping back and forth from the bigger map in the menu screen to mark waypoints and then just using whatever indicators on the screen to navigate. You can scan the nearby area, and that'll alert you to whatever's close, but there's no real way to cause yourself the overwhelming anxiety of taking it all in at once. The markers show up on the bigger map once you've run into them or when you specifically unlock a radio tower in that section of the map. On top of this, the game introduces new secondary activities piecemeal over time, so their appearance layers slowly rather than one big dump.

Local co-op limitations notwithstanding, my only complaint about Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is a minor one: sometimes there's a bit of jank. For example, there was one time where I couldn't open chests with Batman, only Nightwing, after concluding a co-op session. Then there was the time that Robin's AI pathfinding couldn't figure out how to climb a plant stalk and he just spent several minutes grunting and jumping with no purchase. The most common has to be the grappling hook, which is very forgiving about when and where you can shoot it out only to often fall victim to building geometry and cause problems. Don't ask how many times I found myself trying to zip up a building underneath an overpass.

And yet, I happily continue to zip along Gotham, gliding into the night and generally completing various objectives and upgrading skill trees as I see fit. That's after finishing the story, which I could also go back and replay just to make sure I pick up the collectibles in them too. There's just so many little things to do, see, break, and build. And now that I know what to expect, I heavily suspect I'll be running it back twice – once with each kid – before long.

Check out our best Lego games ranking for more bricks to play with!