It’s not unusual for a Lego recreation to cowl a prolonged story – Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, for instance, spans 9 motion pictures’ value of content material.
Lego Batman: Legacy of the Darkish Knight may be TT Video games’ most bold providing but (its comically monumental toys-to-life recreation Lego Dimensions apart, after all). Relatively than encompassing a collection of flicks, this time gamers will work their means by means of Batman’s complete life, in a narrative pulling components from the character’s complete 86-year historical past.
Beginning as a younger Bruce Wayne going to the cinema together with his dad and mom (a ‘block’buster little doubt, provided that it’s Lego), the sport takes gamers by means of each main beat within the character’s story – or at the least TT’s model of his story, which it says is an amalgamation of all of the frequent beats discovered all through the quite a few retellings over the a long time – all the best way as much as his position because the chief of the Bat-Household.
A key instance of how the studio is merging collectively quite a few sources is a piece I performed at Gamescom 2025, during which Batman faces off towards Purple Hood One on the Ace Chemical Processing Plant.
Within the comics, Purple Hood One’s actual title is Liam Distall, and when his physique is discovered at Ace Chemical compounds there’s some confusion as as to if he was the Joker and faked his personal dying, or was changed by the person who would develop into the Joker.
Within the recreation, the battle with Purple Hood One ends with him falling right into a vat of chemical compounds, in a really comparable method to the battle with Jack Napier within the 1989 live-action Batman film. While you knock Purple Hood One into the vat, his masks falls off and he seems suspiciously like Jack Nicholson. He then asks Batman “did you ever dance with the satan within the pale moonlight” (a line from the 1989 movie) and throws Joker playing cards at Batman as he falls into the vat. So it’s a bit much less ambiguous.
That’s to not say the ensuing Joker is the one one within the recreation, nevertheless. It might be unimaginable to have a single Joker design given what number of seems the character has had over time, so TT guarantees that as Batman’s story and look evolves, so too do different characters just like the Joker and the Penguin.
Naturally, this being a Lego recreation you’ll often count on a comically massive variety of ‘characters’ to unlock all through. TT Video games has already confirmed you’ll have the ability to play as Robin, Nightwing, Batgirl, Catwoman, Talia al Ghul and Jim Gordon in addition to Batman, however unusually it seems to be suggesting these are the one seven characters who’re playable.
That is considerably stunning, provided that for the previous twenty years Lego video games have thrived on throwing numerous characters at gamers. Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga had greater than 380 to unlock, with out even bringing DLC into the equation.
“TT Video games has already confirmed you’ll have the ability to play as Robin, Nightwing, Batgirl, Catwoman, Talia al Ghul and Jim Gordon in addition to Batman, however unusually it seems to be suggesting these are the one seven characters who’re playable.”
As a substitute, the studio says gamers will gather 100 fits, together with an array of Batman outfits spanning his 86-year historical past, in addition to alternate outfits for the opposite six characters.
The opposite principal promoting level right here is that that is the primary Lego Batman recreation to supply a correct open world surroundings to discover (reasonably than a collection of phases). Gamers will have the ability to freely run, glide, grapple, fly and drive round Gotham Metropolis, stopping impromptu crimes they spot on the streets, accumulating objects and fixing puzzles. A wide range of Batmobiles from completely different eras shall be out there (together with the Tumbler, fortunately), together with Batcycles and the Batglider.
TT Video games doesn’t typically do sprawling open-world Lego video games, so in a way Legacy of the Darkish Knight seems to be a little bit of a departure from the standard fare. Time will inform whether or not this can be a good transfer, however from what I performed at Gamescom it actually seems that the tweak to the system was simply what was wanted to combine issues up a bit. Let’s simply see if the obvious option to solely provide a small variety of playable characters pays off.
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