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.