Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight
This turned out to be a very weird game. It’s mostly good but gets in its own way too much to be great. And, compared to its predecessor, Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, it feels like a step backwards. Its visual communication is less clear, enemies no longer have health bars.
In the second half of the game I ended up doing something I do very rarely, which is skipping stuff. It was sections or puzzles I either didn’t like or understand, sometimes both, that I didn’t enjoy, so decided I didn’t want to play. Some Waynetech crate puzzles were incomprehensible to me, ditto some of the plants, Batgirl’s hacking mini-game – did three of those and that was enough, a large chunk of the Joker Tumblr chase because it was so annoying and the finale bomb climbing because, again, it was an irritating mess.
In some ways, that’s the greatest insult that can be delivered to a game. It offers a skip feature and you use it because those bits are so bad you don’t want to play them.
It’s a strangely ambivalent game. In that its drawing on Arkham, but its stealth options are often limited, as if its holding back from designing its environments to really let you go nuts on stealth. Like Arkham you can technically use gadgets in battle but there tends to be too much going on to really do so, like Arkham.
Its puzzles and poor visual communication really hurt it badly. Talking of visuals, even with HDR black level set to minimum there were still times when it was too dark to really see easily. If the detect feature was better that might have helped the puzzles, as it is I found it hugely unreliable and variable.
Where it works well is its general story, world design and appearance. It all looks right. As a celebration of Batman’s various incarnations and integration of them it is superb. There’s lots of really neat touches. It is done so well you will likely forgive the various flaws.
I’ve finished the story, will I go back to replay the levels to find the bits I missed? I don’t know because they hid it so well I’d need a guide but I don’t like playing games that way. Some of the side content I do like, so might finish that. Do have some suits and vehicles to unlock.
Combat is OK to good, until a brute turns up, then it goes bad, as they are awful. Boring design, boring to fight, just terrible. There is neat use of Dualsense haptics. As there is of the speaker outside of combat.
Overall, it’s a good but strange game. Its difficulty is uneven, I didn’t like the final boss fights at all. Its side content can be very underhanded, like in the AR trial times. Its ace card is it feels like Batman and Gotham, most of the time combat is fun, as is driving around Gotham.
