Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham hews close to the series’ formula, pairing uncomplicated gameplay with a deep, charming dive into decades’ worth of DC Comics stories and history. But after the impressive freedom of Lego Batman 2 and Lego Marvel, Lego Batman 3 feels far more restrictive in scope, and its inconsistent tone sometimes seems to mock the great DC Comics source material it should be celebrating. Picking up from the end of Lego Batman 2, the villain Braniac drives most of the fun but scattered plot in Lego Batman 3. Without giving too much away, Batman and the rest of the Justice League have to team up with the likes of Lex Luthor, the Joker, and the rest of the Legion of Doom to bring him down, and sort out some trouble with the various Lantern Corps. It’s not as strong or as focused a story as in either Lego Marvel or Lego Batman 2, but it manages to keep the interest high through most of the 10 hours or so it took to finish it. To ensure constant variety, Lego Batman 3 uses the same format as Lego Marvel, where different playable characters drop in and out of the missions at each checkpoint.
You may be playing as Batman and Robin one moment, and then Green Lantern and Martian Manhunter the next. It definitely helps break up the action, which otherwise might get old quickly due to the simplistic attacks, and celebrates a larger roster of DC favorites. The best new addition to the system is that you can now load specific checkpoints of missions for Free Play; it makes finding all those little secrets so much more convenient. When the story missions are finished, there’s loads more to do here, including plenty of other mission-style content. We’re sort of left to figure that stuff out for ourselves, which is actually not such a bad thing; accidentally stumbling on a mission that recreates an old Adam West Batman TV show episode was fantastic. There are also options to explore the Hall of Justice and Hall of Doom, which are super fun for a DC fan like myself. I also enjoyed unlocking some of the more obscure characters from the DC canon – I’m sure not many people are exactly champing at the bit to play as Etrigan or The Question, but it’s great that those more obscure characters get to share the stage with the likes of Superman and Wonder Woman.
It’s clear the game makers love the source material. From Wonder Woman’s idle animation where she does the Linda Carter-style twirl to Flash’s frequent stints on the Cosmic Treadmill and the payoff of that final revelation between Batman and Robin, Lego Batman 3 does a great job of showcasing moments that’ll resonate with fans of the comics. While it’s not quite as developed here as it was in Lego Marvel, I still appreciate that each character has a unique combination of abilities. Martian Manhunter and Superman both have heat vision, but the green guy can also control minds, while Supes has frost breath. This approach to character powers gives us lots of options, which are furthered by the excellent new suit system. No longer do you have to wait to find a station to swap out for the Magnet suit or the Sonar suit, because now characters like Batman, Robin, and Cyborg can change their power setups on the fly. Being able to change at will to any suit you’ve unlocked eliminates a lot of tedium.
Even better, a quick button press instantly swaps you to the suit that’s appropriate to the obstacle you’ve encountered. While not every game has to be open-world to be good, playing Lego Batman 3 made me long for the freedom of Lego Batman 2. Instead of roaming through the streets of Gotham at your discretion, you’re mostly just running back and forth between the Batcave and the Watchtower. There are limited open-world options for the various Lantern planets, but those aren’t part of the main story and are generally small and pretty light on things to do. So why even have these unlockable vehicles if there’s nowhere fun to drive them? My biggest disappointment with Lego Batman 3 is its inconsistent tone. The developers definitely love the source material, but there are moments where they take a substantial step away from familiar franchise turf to introduce elements that immediately start to erode the fun of being in the world of the comics. When Braniac comes to Earth, we don’t get to battle him in iconic DC locations like Smallville, Gorilla City, or Paradise Island;
No, Braniac just terrorizes Paris or Pisa. Shortly after that, you spend the final third of the story missions on a sort of sci-fi tour through unfamiliar Lantern worlds, which is kind of a letdown. I also have to question the decision to include these annoying cameos. Instead of DC’s quintessential everyman Jimmy Olsen, this game’s ubiquitous hanger-on is Conan O’Brien. He’s all over the place, repeating the same gags every time you see him. After a while, making jokes about how there are no Labradors in the Batcave laboratory gets kind of old. You even end up spending quite a bit of time with Daffy Duck as Green Loontern, which, again, kills the mood for me. Yes, I get it; it’s a game where Cyborg can fool a security camera by turning into a washing machine, but there’s a difference between making a joke about the characters and just surrounding them with other stuff that also happens to be part of the Warner Bros. empire. (I didn’t have as much of a problem with the inclusion of references to the Batman TV show because that, at least, seems to make some sense within Lego Batman 3’s world – and unlike Daffy Duck, Adam West isn’t hanging around the Watchtower talking about space the whole time.)
I like Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham, but I don’t love it as much as I’ve loved previous games in the series. It definitely delivers on the promise of letting me play with charmingly realized versions of many of my favorite DC heroes and villains, and it even presents a setting with lots of great surprises, challenges, and systems that promote variety. As a longtime DC fan, I do wish it had given me the chance to dig into more locations and plot elements from the comics, but the biggest hurdle for me to clear is the bizarre cameos.LEGO Batman 2 was the first TT Games title to introduce an open world to the franchise, allowing you to roam freely across Gotham City between story missions. Every game TT has done since has incorporated the concept, improving it with each iteration. Wandering around all of Middle Earth in LEGO Lord of the Rings was pretty darn amazing, and exploring every nook and cranny of the mind-bogglingly huge New York City in LEGO Marvel Superheroes was so much fun and so jam-packed with content that it could have been a perfectly satisfying game in and of itself.
So I was disappointed to discover that LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham abandons the open world concept. It's not like you're stuck in a tiny hub area like Wrex's Diner from the original LEGO Star Wars. You have plenty of room to move around and interact with characters that need your help. But LEGO Batman 3 takes a big step backward to the large-but-confined spaces of LEGO Star Wars III. Batman 3 gives you three main areas to roam and explore between missions: the Hall of Justice (which includes what's basically a small annex for the Hall of Doom), the Batcave, and the Watchtower space station. The latter area is your main hub, and it's quite huge, with new rooms unlocking after almost every Story mission. But it just can't compare to roaming outside across a vast, open world. I see why TT Games didn't want a repeat trip to Gotham City after the second game, but exploring three interior structures -- as big as they may be -- still feels claustrophobic by comparison. There are plenty of other DC Comics locations that could have been turned into open worlds for Beyond Gotham.
How cool would it have been to have a full universe to free-roam through? Like LEGO's version of Middle Earth, it would have to be scaled-down to bring everything closer together, but the DC universe is a big place with plenty of variety to keep things interesting. That big caveat aside, LEGO Batman 3 is every bit as much of a blast to play as fans hope it is. It feels very much like a direct answer to LEGO Marvel Superheroes, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It incorporates every single good idea from Marvel and adds in a slew of new ones. Various unique character abilities, like the power to stretch or use electricity, are taken right out of Marvel, right down to the same movement animations. One copied-to-the-letter feature I could have lived without was Batman 3's "Stan Lee in Peril" substitute, "Adam West in Peril." It's so similar, it's almost insultingly derivative. Yeah, it's cute to hear Adam West touting his fame and asking for your help getting out of a tricky situation -- once.
Unfortunately, you have to hear West say the same lines over and over all throughout the game, and it wears thin very fast. Thankfully, despite all of the similarities to Marvel, LEGO Batman 3 is entirely worthwhile on its own merits, largely thanks to the fun new capabilities and the enormous variety of playable characters. Chief among those new features: the power suits that certain characters get to wear. Batman, Robin, Cyborg, Lex Luthor, Joker, and a handful of others all have collections of unique outfits that they can change into as needed (after the suits are found and unlocked, of course) to interact with the world and solve puzzles. Magnetic suits, for example, or hazmat suits, or space suits. The majority of characters, however, are like Superman or Wonder Woman, with a specific set of powers that never change. LEGO Batman 3 draws on the enormous catalog of DC heroes and villains, giving you more than 150 playable characters. I like to think that I know quite a lot about comics, but there are several characters in this game I'd never heard of before.
The story is fun, if not quite as clever as it wants to be. But it hits a home run when a selection of heroes and villains are hit by random beams of Lantern energy. The Lantern powers alter their personalities with hysterical results: Wonder Woman becomes a raging warrior who's mad at the world; Lex Luthor turns into a caring, nurturing soul; Solomon Grundy turns happy and hopeful; Flash becomes greedy and self-centered; Cyborg becomes afraid of everything; Well, Joker is still Joker, but he loses the homicidal part of his maniacal glee and becomes more helpful and supportive. The hijinks that ensue are easily the highlight of the story. Bad guy Brainiac, bored with his usual shrinking and collecting of cities, has decided he wants to collect whole worlds now and Earth is at the top of his wishlist. He manages to shrink the planet, but only partly. So there are a handful of quirky levels set in familiar places like Europe and Gotham — only they're presented at about half their usual size.
So Batman and Robin and everyone else look a bit like Godzilla as they run around these miniaturized locales, fighting equally huge bad guys and breaking apart little trees and buildings. Other levels are fairly run-of-the-mill. We get to visit each of the Lantern home worlds, which is enjoyable at least the first time through. Each planet gets its own ecology, bad guys, and theme music (I particularly enjoyed the pulsing rhythm of the Red Lantern planet), though each one ends in a fight with a giant, ring-colored monster. We know TT Games is capable of great variety, so resorting to the same kind of boss battles over and over feels a little lazy. There's one inspired level where you run around the spinning exterior of the Watchtower, and it looks very impressive on a PS4. Coin collection is as fun as ever, though the balance of coins in the Story levels was a bit unpredictable. Most levels contain more than enough coins to get you to "True Hero" status on first play-through, but there were one or two early levels where I'm quite certain I smashed up the world and grabbed every last coin I could, and still couldn't acquire enough for True Hero.
Playing as Superman is a blast, since he's impervious to harm, but of course that makes for unchallenging gameplay, so you'll understand if Story Mode doesn't offer you the chance to play as Superman very often. Flash moves so fast across the screen, he frequently caused my motion sickness to kick in, but he's awfully handy to have around when it's time to build something out of LEGO bricks. Where other characters build at a slow, steady pace, Flash zips around in hyper-speed and builds crazy fast. As in LEGO Batman 2, the game plays John Williams' Superman theme when Supes takes flight. New this time around is the use of the Wonder Woman theme from the 70s TV show that plays whenever she flies. The trifecta is completed with liberal use of the NA-na-NA-na-NA-na-NA-na Batman theme from the Adam West cheesefest. It's thoughtfully cheeky inside jokes like these that give the LEGO games their appeal. That said, Conan O'Brien, Kevin Smith, and "Green Lantern Daffy Duck" put in awkward cameos in the Watchtower for no reason I could discern.
Jim Lee and Geoff Johns' appearances are a little more understandable at least, since they're major DC Comics execs (and fan-favorite creators). Like its predecessors, LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham is loaded to the gills with extra content and tons of deployability. But the best part of the game is getting to try out those many, many DC characters and see what sorts of goofy things they do. Flash tends to do super-fast push-ups while he's waiting around doing nothing, for example, and Cyborg's finishing attack move is to throw a bad guy high in the air and then shoot him with his arm canon. And it never gets old. It could have used a few more injections of creativity and inspiration in a handful of key places, but it's every bit as much a blast to play as other recent LEGO games. DC Comics fans will no doubt want to venture to TT Games' headquarters to personally thank the developers for all the love and attention they poured into their favorite superheroes and villains. Lego, LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham, TT Games, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, DC Comics, Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Video Games, Reviews