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.Kameron Hurley’s nonfiction writing recently won awards in two separate categories at this year’s Hugo ceremony (Best Fan Writer and Best Related Work, to be exact). Her first science fiction novel, God’s War, was shortlisted for, among others, the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the BSFA Award. The Bel Dame Apocrypha trilogy (God’s War, Infidel, and Rapture) heralded the arrival of new, uncompromising voice in the SFF field. Hurley’s first outings proved her ability to innovate: to mix really weird elements of worldbuilding with visceral brutality and strong characterisation, in stories that have interesting arguments about social change, war, and survival at their core.
Stories with a deeply, angrily, feminist vein. The Mirror Empire takes what Hurley’s already shown us she’s capable of with regard to science fiction, and applies it to the vast canvas of epic fantasy. This isn’t the epic fantasy we’re all used to, though, recognisably inspired by cultures from our own history—and that mostly northern European ones. No: this is epic fantasy that builds its world from the ground up, and that world is deeply, fascinatingly weird. It becomes apparent early on that there isn’t just one world, either. There are parallel worlds, alternate realities, which are coming closer to each other. This approach—this ability to travel between (so far two) realities—is connection to the rising of Oma, the dark star. For magic in the world of The Mirror Empire is connected to the ascent and descent of satellites. When a specific satellite is in ascendance, those born gifted with the right talents can draw on the power of the satellite, but the satellites rise and fall over the course of years and at uncertain intervals.
Oma has not been rising for several hundred years, and the last time it rose—every time it has risen—it has been accompanied by war and devastation on a grand scale, although the records of the previous time are scattered and for the most part destroyed. It is not only in magic that Hurley displays her imagination, however, but in the flora and fauna of The Mirror Empire. The forests of The Mirror Empire are harsh places, dangerous, filled with carnivorous and poisonous plants—many of which are unusually mobile. One of the main characters, the temple servant Lilia, loses part of her foot to acid from a plant during a battle in her childhood. There are a great many characters in The Mirror Empire. It’s a book I thoroughly enjoyed, but there’s no question that it involves a great many narrative threads, all of which demand you hit the ground running and keep up. This makes for a confusing beginning, and the presence of several significant viewpoint characters means that the pacing seems rather slow to start.
But Hurley’s characterisation is sufficiently interesting, her prose style sufficiently muscular and gripping, to carry me along—and once The Mirror Empire gets its feet under it, it starts to bring things together with verve and panache and violent brutality and genocide and invasion. Ahkio is the first man, and the first ungifted person, to inherit the leadership of the independent Dhai people, a nation of pacifists with limited central authority. But his sister’s death was anything but natural: his rule is threatened from both within and without, and he may not be able to rely on his advisors to steer him through the perils ahead. Roh is a young, gifted Dhai student who desperately wants to be a fighter. Sent to the warlike Saiduan as part of a delegation of scholars who are searching for scraps of information that might stop the horde of invaders that have all but overrun the Saiduan nation, he may achieve his goal—but not without great cost. Zezili is a Dorimah general, half-Dhai in ancestry in an empire where the Dhai are slaves, whose empress has set her under the command of strangers and tasked her to exterminate the Dhai.
Taigan is a Saiduan gifted, who can draw on the powers of Oma and whose body changes between outwardly male and outwardly female attributes at unpredictable intervals, who has been bound to bring others who can draw on Oma back to Saiduan. But the narrative thread which does most to unite the novel’s disparate arcs is Lilia’s. Brought between realities as a child, her presence or its echoes connect the other viewpoint characters. She grows from a child not knowing her own importance to a young woman determined to make her own choices—and to use those choices to protect others. I really enjoyed The Mirror Empire. It’s a vivid, visceral, imaginative entry in the epic fantasy stakes, one that’s doing interesting things with society, culture, and gender and gender roles. With lots of BOOM—Hurley, on form, doesn’t hesitate to kick you in the throat just to get your attention. But it’s far from a perfect book. The absence of a single strong narrative thread means that the reader doesn’t have the information to build a solid picture of what’s happening until relatively late in the story, and the structure feels somewhat awkward, as though there are five litres of plot in a two litre jug.