Pursuers in the Sewers LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham Sign In or Join to save for later Platforms: Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo Wii U, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Windows, Xbox 360, Xbox One What parents need to know Parents Need to Know About our ratings and privacy evaluation The LEGO Movie Videogame LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean LEGO Marvel Super Heroes Top advice and articles What parents and kids sayLEGO special promotion: LEGO Batman 1,2,3 + season pass 75% off; LEGO Harry Potter 1-4, 5-7 75% off; )submitted by π Rendered by PID 122150 on app-786 at 2017-03-02 14:08:18.538563+00:00 running ca42739 country code: SG.Lego Batman: Beyond Gotham Platform: PlayStation 4 (reviewed), Xbox One, Wii U, Windows PC, Mac OS X, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PlayStation Vita, Nintendo 3DS Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment Release: November 11, 2014 I greeted the arrival of Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham a bit less enthusiastically than I do most Lego games.
My daughter and I adore Traveller’s Tales plastic brick adventures, but after playing and reviewing nine new Lego games in the last 20 months (for real – see sidebar for a full list), I was starting to feel like perhaps I could do with a break from making shiny minifigures smash stuff. Turns out I was wrong. It took less than half an hour for me to get back into the swing of things. By the time we encountered a level with Wonder Woman and discovered that her crackly 1970s TV show theme song begins blasting whenever she takes to the air my daughter and I were both letting loose pig-snort giggles of delight. The Lego video game legacy Few game franchises are as wildly prolific as Warner Bros. Interactive’s Lego games. British studio Traveller’s Tales has managed to pump out some two-dozen Lego games since Lego Star Wars: The Video Game arrived less than a decade ago in 2005, and nine of them have been released since March of last year (that’s nearly one every two months!).
Here’s a list of all of Traveller’s Tales Lego games to date. How many have you and your family played? Lego Star Wars: The Video Game (2005) Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy (2006) Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga (2007) Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures (2008) Lego Batman: The Video Game (2008) Lego Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues (2009) Lego Rock Band (2009) Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4 (2010) Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars (2011) Lego Pirates of the Caribbean: The Video Game (2011) Lego Battles: Ninjago (2011) Lego Harry Potter: Years 5-7 (2011) Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes (2012) Lego The Lord of the Rings (2012) Lego City Undercover (2013) Lego City Undercover: The Chase Begins (2013) Lego Legends of Chima: Laval’s Journey (2013) Lego Marvel Super Heroes (2013) The Lego Movie Videogame (2014) Lego The Hobbit (2014) Lego Ninjago Nindroids (2014)
Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham (2014) I suspect the main reason parents like me enjoy playing Lego games more than other kids games is their humour, and the witty writing remains the chief draw for moms and dads playing Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham. The story – some innocuous nonsense about Brainiac shrinking and collecting worlds and his plan to make Earth the next addition to his collection – is neither here nor there. I doubt I’ll remember it by this time next year. It’s the chatter between heroes (and villains; the bad guys team up with the good because Lex doesn’t want to be “president of a marble”) that will lead you to laugh aloud. A handful celebrity cameos – including Conan O’Brien, Kevin Smith, and a perpetually imperilled Adam West as themselves – make for nice surprises. But better still is the sharp dialogue between scores of recognizable heroes, villains, and other random DC characters – including, happily, a playable Alfred, who wields a serving platter with great gusto.
Robin takes on a strong supporting role this time out, coming off as a clueless, wide-eyed kid who wants to win Batman’s approval. He’s not the brightest building brick on the block, but his bungling is a hoot and his sympathetic nature makes him easy to like. You’ll probably care what happens to him more than anyone else, even the Caped Crusader. Minor subplots, often delivered through blink-and-you’ll-miss-it snippets of clever wordplay – like Cheetah telling Wonder Woman that Superman doesn’t like her as much as she’d like him to – provide clues to other stories going on in the DC universe, some of which get fleshed out a bit more as the story progresses. It’s all quite digestible – smart, even – and ought to tickle fans of these characters regardless of how many moons they’ve seen or which restroom they happen to use. The folks at Traveller’s Tales clearly admire and respect the DC Comics universe, and it shines through in just about every part of the experience.
As for what players do between all the witty banter, it’s pretty familiar. Each level is dense with activities. You’ll smash countless objects into their constituent bricks and harvest the studs that pop out of them. You’ll fight various minifigure minions as well as their much more powerful masters. And you’ll encounter plenty of clever puzzles that require players to make smart use of their heroes’ special abilities and suits. Granted, many of these abilities aren’t quite as unique and clever as what we saw in last year’s Lego Marvel Super Heroes. A lot of heroes share the same powers, such as shields, grapples, and sonar. And others are growing a little long in the tooth within the series, like rockets (good for destroying shiny silver objects) and lasers (used, as usual, to cut through and blow up glittery golden stuff). But there are enough abilities here that none become tiresome. Action animations, meanwhile, are lovely – particularly those accompanying the brick-by-brick building of massive models, such as Batman’s spaceship.
But there isn’t much in the way of advancement in the series’ gradual graphical evolution – save perhaps the funky X-ray-like visual effect accompanying Batman’s sensor suit mode that turns the whole screen a green and instantly renders objects and characters (or, I should say, characters’ skeletal innards) as comic book-style line drawings. There are a few lightly innovative levels, too. One early mission has a group of heroes traversing the rotating exterior of a space ship. It’s a bit disconcerting to start, but quickly begins to make sense. It reminded me a little of certain Super Mario Galaxy levels. I also enjoyed a series of quick puzzle platforming levels set in a Tron-like black and blue computer grid. Then there are the miniaturized locations, including Paris and London, where heroes and villains tower over and smash through the environment. I found them a bit reminiscent of Halo levels in which you get to pilot a Scorpion tank; you’ll feel overpowered, but in the best of ways.