LEGO Ideas will be offline for maintenance in the next couple hours for about 15 minutes. Thank you for your patience. Before you can vote for cool new LEGO sets, or submit your own you'll need to sign in with or register for a LEGO ID: You're currently signed in to LEGO ID as . Would you like to sign in to LEGO Ideas with this LEGO ID? LEGO Ideas is designed for older builders. We’re sorry, but based on the birth date we have on file for you, this means we can't let you have an account here. Create and Share Galleries as a place to share your models with other LEGO builders like you. Are you sure you want to log out of LEGO Ideas? Posted by zompist under Lego Batman 2 was on sale recently, so I picked it up. In brief: the main story is fun and very cute; the open world bit is only half cooked. I’ve never played one of these Lego games before, so here’s how that works: the characters are made of Legos. So are part but not all of their surroundings– in general, the Lego bits are the things you can interact with, which is a pretty clever bit of design signaling.
(If you’ve played the others, apparently it’s a big thing that in this one the characters talk.) A level basically consists of a series of obstacles, to be solved by the characters’ special abilities. E.g. you might use Batman’s batarangs to destroy something out of reach, or Robin’s acrobatics to climb, or Superman’s super-breath to turn water into ice (which can be traversed). It looks like it’s optimized for two-player co-op, but it’s quite easy to play solo– there’s a key press to switch characters. At first you only get Batman and Robin, but later you get Superman and then a whole slew of heroes. The puzzles are designed so that you have to switch frequently. Sometimes when you destroy something, they can rebuild the Lego pieces into something else. Often this is a suit dispenser: jump on it and Batman or Robin changes into a different outfit with new powers. In the screenshot, Bats is wearing his Electrical Suit, which lets him walk through electrified areas and power devices up or down.
The story levels are a lot of fun. The designers have worked hard to make the game look and act like a set of toys: the characters waddle around cutely, they look pleased as punch when they change suits, when a character dies it shatters into blocks, and you are encouraged to mindlessly destroy things. If you die yourself, you respawn right there, so it’s never a real setback. Most of the time it’s fairly clear what to do; I am not very good at the sort of thinking required and had to consult a walkthrough. The game was evidently designed for consoles, so it comes with a pretty horrible set of controls– all keys, no mouse. I had to remap just about everything to have it make sense. (I recommend using the arrow keys for movement, using space for jump and E for action as in sanely designed games, then using T for tag and G for ‘special’. Then you move with the right hand and do stuff with the left.) There aren’t many controls, and most are explained in-game, but they neglected to tell you how to punch things (it’s Action, the one I remapped to E).
After the Asylum mission you can wander Gotham City as you like. The walkthrough suggested that you wait till the story mode is over before doing so, as there’s a lot you can’t do till you’ve unlocked all the basic heroes. This is bad advice, because the story missions are the best part, and you shouldn’t rush through them. In any case, the main mission took me about 15 hours. After this you can roam Gotham and pick up new characters. This part of the game is frankly disappointing. For one thing, you have to buy each character– not with real money, but with the studs you’ve collected by destroying Lego objects. This was a strange design decision, because it’s easy to run out of studs, so you can’t collect more heroes till you go on a rampage. And busting up objects, in the quantities needed to collect 50 characters, is not that fun. There’s a lot to do– climb buildings as Robin, rescue citizens, drive or boat around. But it feels like you have to run a round quite a bit to find these diversions.
Finding the unlockable characters sounds like it should be a great time– each one is slightly different– but for the most part the fights are too easy and the payoff is low. (One exception is Lex Luthor, who you want for his special gun that destroys black Lego objects, which no other character can do.) Plus if you defeat them and you don’t have enough studs, you’re out of luck, which is a strange punishment for the game to apply. So, it’s fun to run around for awhile changing characters, but actually unlocking everyone and finding all the collectibles doesn’t seem very attractive. I think they would have done a lot better to have fewer characters, but more challenging mini-levels to get through to unlock them. Or have more character-specific things to do, like the Robin acrobatics diversions. Story mode has a story, by the way. It’s pretty good, as Batman stories go. Probably the best thing about it is the interaction between grumpy Batman and cocky jocky Superman.
It lightly pokes fun at their relationship, and yet it actually creates a character arc for the game, which is more than you might expect in a kids’ version of DC.Time to rip off this Band-Aid: The Lego Movie 2 is being postponed. I know how you must feel — take as much time as you need to fume, or sob, or ragepunch a hole through a few fully built LEGO sets. According to The Hollywood Reporter, The Lego Movie 2 is being pushed into some shadowy date beyond 2017, because — and here’s the good news (our anti-Band-Aid) — their priority is now a Lego Batman movie.You probably should, because Warner Bros. is doting on Lego Batman with the same care and devotion it had for The Lego Movie 2 (unlike the solely-to-sell-toys-no-adult-can-pronounce Lego Ninjago spin-off). It’ll be directed by Chris McKay, animation supervisor on the first Lego Movie, and produced by LEGO wonderpair Phil Lord and Chris Miller.This, as you may recall, was the same setup for The Lego Movie 2.
Will Arnett is set to return as cinema’s most dickheaded version of the caped crusader, and Warners may even slot this one on the same May 26, 2017 date reserved for Lego 2. There’s but one difference — Lego Batman’s screenwriter will be Seth Grahame-Smith (writer of the “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” and “Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter” novels), presumably to add the appropriate tinge of darkness.As a neat bonus, Lego Batman is also the ideal Batman for anyone suffering Batman fatigue (or hesitant about the amount of humorless anger-screaming in Batman v Superman: Dawn of At Least Eight Sequels). It’s the perfect palette cleanser, a Batman movie that’ll be (I’m assuming, though it’s kind of a gimme) lighthearted and kid-friendly and entirely unlike what Ben Affleck will be doing when he dons six tons of Bat-Power Armor in a year and a half. A Batman that, like the last outing, we can enjoy simply as Batman, and not as a Trojan Horse for someone’s Marvel Cinematic Universe clone.
Expect this to have more than just Batman, though. We already had a bare bones Justice League in The Lego Movie — Superman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern, all with appropriate celebrity voices (Channing Tatum, Cobie Smulders and Jonah Hill, respectively) — and it’d be foolish to assume they wouldn’t pop in for an entirely superhero-based LEGO spin-off. And if the film takes any inspiration from the two LEGO Batman games (another probable gimme), it’ll include at least a few dozen more. The games are all about wacky adventures with as many superheroes as will fit on a single disc — the second game in the series, LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes, contained 50+ playable characters, the vast majority of them from DC Comics (although some, like “Policeman” or “Riddler Goon,” are a total cop-out). LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham, due out this fall, is said to have at least 150.Lego Batman could be everything we’ve ever wanted — a movie with a mass Justice League, all of whom are bright and cheerful, and whose costumes aren’t all muted and colorless, embarking on a grim n’ dark-free adventure with all the terrific brick effects of the first film.