Home > Product Reviews > Game Reviews > Lego Batman 3 is cookie-cutter game design at its worst. It’s a perfectly functional game, with bright colors, family-friendly play, and grin-worthy writing, but it’s undeniably safe. There’s nothing remotely interesting or forward-thinking about it; worse even, it manages to step back from some of the new ideas its predecessor introduced. The biggest shame of all is that it’s not broken out of the gate. At least in that case, developer TT Games might be encouraged to re-think its increasingly stale Lego game framework. This is a series that refuses to grow, even as it chases an older audience. It’s a new adventure for Batman and his pals in the Justice League. Brainiac is out to shrink down the planet Earth for his private collection, and he’s using the combined powers of the cosmic Lantern Corps (and Sinestro Corps) to win his prize. Only the collected talents of DC Comics’ mightiest heroes can hope to stop him.
Lego Batman 2 moved the series forward by introducing Gotham City as a freely explorable open world for the first time in any Lego game. Beyond Gotham reins that freedom in, with exploration restricted to hubs like the Batcave and the Watchtower, Justice League’s orbital base. There’s still plenty of stuff to find. Minikit pieces, hidden characters, context-specific collectibles, and more fill every level. Most of it can’t be unearthed on an initial playthrough since the characters in each level – and abilities you have access to – are scripted. To find and fully unlock everything, you need to run through each level twice, at the very least: Once for the story and again, in Free Play, for the collectibles. The cast of 150-plus characters ranges from known DC faves like Batgirl and Lobo to lesser-known characters like Doctor Fate and The Fierce Flame – but they all draw from the same, limited pool of powers. The Fierce Flame is basically just a palette-swapped Flash;
Doctor Fate just combines the abilities of two “core” characters. Then there are random cast members, like Kevin Smith (armed with a sonar gun, for some reason) and original 1960s Batman actor Adam West, unlocked by completing “Adam West In Peril” mini-challenges in each level. They’re joined by DC execs Jim Lee and Geoff Johns, and late-night host Conan O’Brien, who serves as your tour guide in each hub. The result is a game that doesn’t seem to identify its audience properly. Again and again, TT Games has defended design decisions like the lack of online play in Lego games as the price paid for family-friendliness in its games. But what young gamer really knows who Conan O’Brien is? Is a 10-year-old really going to get excited about playing as Geoff Johns? Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham can’t make up its mind about what type of fan it should serve. There’s plenty to discover outside the story missions. Unlocking gold bricks – the series’ standard marker of progress – opens up access to a series of hub areas, Earthly and otherwise.
In addition to familiar locations like the Hall of Justice, there are also exploration zones on each of the Lantern worlds (in addition to the story levels for each one). There are also new VR Missions that amount to quick-hit challenges you can complete for even more rewards. It’s a lot of content, sure, but there’s not enough depth in the gameplay to justify anyone pursuing 100-percent completion. Combat still boils down to mashing on buttons until all the enemies are gone. Puzzles are just simple as they’ve always been, with a static difficulty designed to favor the youngest audience possible. But it’s been almost 10 years since the first of these titles – Lego Star Wars: The Video Game – arrived, and the series has failed to grow with its audience. The writing is sharp, no question. It’s hard not to grin when Wonder Woman takes flight to the sounds of the old TV show’s theme song. That’s not enough though. The 10-year-old Lego Star Wars fans that are now 20 don’t want to simply mash buttons through hours and hours of mindless entertainment.
This is a series that refuses to grow, even as it chases an older audience. The result is a divided experience that leans too heavily on fan service without building in enough gameplay to keep those older players happy. TT Games needs to embrace evolution in its increasingly stagnant catalog of Lego games. It also needs to decide on an audience. Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham can’t make up its mind about what type of fan it should serve. This game was reviewed on a PlayStation 4 using a disc provided by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment.PSLS • • • The LEGO video game series has really taken on a life of its own. I’m sure there are adults and children the world over who look forward to the next entry, no matter the franchise it carries. While the series continues to release on more than a yearly basis, the quality seems to be pretty consistently high. Can LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham keep the momentum going?Controls are deceptively simple. Much like any other LEGO game, you move around with the left analog stick, and can pan the camera temporarily with the right stick.
X jumps/glides/flies, depending on your character, and square attacks. New to the Batman entries is the Gadget Wheel. Once you acquire suits by playing through the campaign, your character can be used in certain different situation, and gain new abilities. Batman and Robin are the first to see this, and some suits enable Batman to become invisible, or enter a green detective mode to discover hidden interactive objects. Robin gains abilities such as a suit that lights up the darkness after being charged, and another that allows you to control an even tinier remote-controlled version of him to travel to those hard-to-reach locations and continue on.Like any good LEGO game, each mission has several puzzles for you to solve. While most of these are pretty simple, and the game constantly bombards you with obvious hints, occasionally some of these puzzles are not so clear at first. Usually, the solution is to break everything in sight, which uncovers hopping LEGO pieces that must be assembled into some contraption to help you move forward.
Some of these puzzles are in the form of minigames, such as switching circuits on a giant board to bypass a lock, or playing what is essentially a quick version of the plumber game, where you have to make a complete path for fluid to take from one end of the area to the other. Boss battles occasionally take place in minigames as well, which could be decent standalone games all their own. It’s impressive the way Traveller’s Tales integrated so many different genres at times, without breaking the game.While there are dozens of missions available, the game is fairly linear. You are able to free-roam in certain rooms, but beyond that, you progress from mission to mission in a straight line. With a large story to get through, it’s no surprise that the game proceeds in a linear fashion, so it cannot really be faulted for this. Once you beat a mission, you can go back and replay it in an attempt to nab all the LEGO pieces and collect every hidden secret, as well as save Adam West in whatever perilous situation he currently finds himself in.
Of course, co-op play is here as well, so LEGO Batman 3 remains a great game to play with a friend or, ideally, your children.Technically speaking, LEGO Batman 3 looks good and runs smoothly. But it’s certainly not pushing the PS4 very hard. Our unit’s fans hardly whirred while the game was playing, indicating that it wasn’t stressed. With the art style of LEGO games, I suppose there is a certain threshold for realistic graphics before the game loses some of its charm. But still, I would have liked to see how many LEGO entities could be kept on the screen at a time before the frame rate started to dip. Console parity was also likely a priority by the developer, given that the game is out on the PS4, PS3, PS Vita, Xbox One, Xbox 360, Wii U, 3DS, Windows and even iOS!In another example of the great amount of detail Traveller’s Tales went to produce the whole package, LEGO Batman 3 is fully voiced. Most of the acting is very well done, and includes recurring voice actors such as Troy Baker (Batman), Travis Willingham (Superman), and, in a great cameo, Adam West (as in the 1960s Batman).
Each mission has at least a basic cinematic, though several have genuinely entertaining cutscenes. There is a lot of humor in this game, and it’s surprisingly, and refreshingly, clean humor that is fine to play with young ears around. There’s a lot of little touches in the audio, as well, including theme songs from older shows playing when certain characters fly such as Superman or Wonder Woman.If you’re a Batman fan of any age, you’ll want to pick up this game. With couch co-op for two, LEGO Batman 3 is a picture-perfect game to play alongside children. It can be a bit slow going at the start, but power through the introductory missions, acquire some suits, and things really start rolling. With a mission count that numbers near 50, and over 150 characters to play as (gotta catch ’em all?), there is a ton of content to bask in. While a lot of the combat and puzzles might feel a bit repetitive, you’ll hardly notice as you mete out justice as a tiny version of your favorite hero.