Review: Lego back with its winning formula in new Batman game

Lego’s extreme revitalisation as a company after it decided some external licence agreements might be a good idea - starting with Star Wars in 1998 - has been well documented.

It’s also been an absolute boon for Warner Bros subsidiary TT Games, who have now been churning out umpteen titles based on Lego versions of not only Star Wars, but Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Jurassic Park and whichever of the Marvel or DC universes is your favourite for over two decades.

Now they're back for a fourth tilt at Batman - though in fairness, the Caped Crusader turned out to work so well as a Lego guy that we got an entire fun feature film out of it.

If you’ve played any of those titles in the past (a quick search suggests there are now 35 of them) you’ll know what to expect here.

But there’s a reason TT Games have been able to keep up this prodigious output for so long; their formula is a winning one in an often overlooked family-friendly gaming space. So it proves again here, with gameplay simple enough for kids to enjoy and collectables galore, while the olds are also kept charmed with secrets, cheeky references to the source (and other) material and a winningly goofy sense of humour.

Legacy of the Dark Knight lives up to its name by taking on the rather ambitious project of gathering up a vast swathe of existing Batman material and trying to assemble it into sort of a narrative supercut.

You’ll guide young Lego Bruce Wayne through the tragedy of his parents’ death and into his training with the League of Shadows, as seen in Batman Begins (2005), before becoming Batman and teaming up with young Jim Gordon to investigate Carmine Falcone’s Iceberg Lounge and the Penguin (The Batman, 2022), taking on the Red Hood Gang from influential comics runs in the early 2010s, and going on to thwart the Joker’s plan to gas Gotham City with giant parade balloons (Batman, 1989) and Two Face at the circus with the help of a young Robin (Batman Forever, 1995) ... and so it goes on.

It’s a lot, but as a sort of highlight reel it allows Batman’s roster of villains to each take their turn in the spotlight and brings in each of the characters who can join Batman for some couch co-op, from Gordon to Catwoman, Robin (later Nightwing) and Batgirl.

Each story mission tends to offer neat homage to its inspirations, such as the Prince-like track playing from ghetto blasters as the Joker vandalises the Flugelheim Art Museum (ah, 1989).

Between these story missions, the open, Lego-y world of a night-time Gotham City is yours to explore. This is stuffed full of Riddler puzzles, secrets to find, crimes in progress to stop, races to take part in and even escaped zoo animals to track down.

Batman and friends can hang-glide and grapple around the city, or hit the streets in one of a vast number of variations of the Batmobile - or Gordon’s police cruiser, or Catwoman’s motorbike - to go looking for trouble and make their way to the next story mission when they’re ready.

Rocksteady’s rightly well-regarded Arkham Batman games are a clear inspiration here, and this extends to the combat, which steps up the typical Lego game ‘‘bash A until finished’’ fight to a simplified version of those games’ one-vs-many ‘‘flow’’ melees, complete with counters, combos, dodges and takedowns - although I can’t remember Catwoman ever producing a fish from nowhere and slapping a henchman in the face with it in the Arkham games.

If you need a breather, you can head back to the Batcave to buy more looks, check out your car collection or install a hot tub.

Both mission design and the open world call on the abilities of different characters. You’ll need Batman to pull something open with a grappling hook, but Catwoman to crack a safe or summon a Lego cat with a laser pointer to sneak through a vent and press a button for you.

While the roster of playable characters is not as large as in previous Lego games, each character has two unique abilities that can be upgraded to be used in different ways, so there’s plenty of variety on show both in (admittedly still simple) puzzle design and in approaches to combat, from blinding goons with a shot from Gordon’s goo-gun to Catwoman going on the offensive by summoning an angry clowder of kitties to hilariously swarm some unfortunate gang member.

Fun little touches are everywhere. Above all, Legacy feels like a game lovingly made, from the oodles of currency-dispensing smashable stuff lying around (there must be literally millions of studs available to collect in the game) - which are objects clearly designed and built with actual Lego pieces - to catching unsuspecting goons in the middle of conversations about their lack of health insurance or funny slapstick twists on the often grim-dark Batman lore, like Harvey Dent becoming Two Face after taking a key lime pie ‘‘right in the eye’’.

The formula may be much the same as usual, but on this evidence there’s life in it yet.