“Catman? No, Adam West from TV?”
I blame The Fairly OddParents for the fact that this is still one of the first things my brain produces whenever somebody mentions Batman. Adam West’s wonderfully ridiculous Catman cameo apparently left a permanent mark, which probably tells you roughly how qualified I am to discuss seventy-plus years of Batman history. I’ve never been particularly invested in DC, or superhero comics in general. I know the major characters, I’ve watched plenty of the films, and I can identify more Robins than I probably have any practical reason to, but Batman has never been one of those universes where I needed to know every detail. Video games were different, though, where the Arkham games got me. There was something about gliding across Gotham, stalking criminals from gargoyles and then dropping into a room to beat up seventeen people while maintaining Batman’s very convincing argument that he definitely doesn’t kill anyone, and then there’s LEGO. Those games have their own strange corner of my gaming history. For years, TT Games could slap LEGO onto practically anything and convince me that smashing every object in a room for studs was a perfectly reasonable use of a free Saturday or an all-nighter. So LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight starts from an unusually strong position with me; it’s Batman filtered through two versions of Batman I already like. Then TT Games apparently decided that wasn’t enough and threw almost every other version into the box.
Some days you just can’t get rid of a Batman
The first thing that struck me is how little Legacy of the Dark Knight cares about choosing one definitive Batman. It starts with Bruce Wayne’s journey towards becoming Batman, but from there it happily pulls imagery, characters, and situations from decades of adaptations. One moment feels distinctly Nolan, another gives me Arkham flashbacks, then something happens that I’m fairly sure came from a completely different movie before the game turns around and jokes about it all. I probably missed half the references, but that’s part of the fun. Lander went into considerably more detail in his Xbox review, particularly on how TT Games essentially built an “ultimate” Batman narrative from pieces of the movies, comics, television, and games, which can be found here:
Review: LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight
Afterward, I played the Switch 2 version and was surprised by how good it all works. Batman might be uniquely suited to this treatment. There have been so many versions of the character that everybody seems to have their own Batman anyway, because Adam West is Batman, Michael Keaton is Batman, Christian Bale is Batman, just as much as our shiny sparkle-vampire Robert Pattinson is Batman. And yes, Kevin Conroy is definitely Batman, and, before we forget, LEGO Batman is Batman. Apparently the answer to decades of continuity arguments was just to make everyone plastic. LEGO also gives the writers permission to move between sincere Batman storytelling and complete stupidity without either side feeling particularly out of place. Bruce can be brooding over Gotham one minute and involved in a ridiculous visual gag the next. It works because the game isn’t laughing at Batman so much as laughing at how inherently strange Batman becomes when you describe him out loud. A billionaire dresses as a bat, operates from a cave underneath his mansion, and owns several increasingly impractical bat-shaped vehicles. Half the criminals in Gotham have committed so hard to a theme that they might as well have branding departments, which makes Batman ridiculous, but also cool. And Legacy of the Dark Knight understands that both sides can coexist.
I am vengeance, I am the night, I am definitely collecting that purple stud
That balance continues once you’re actually controlling him, and the Arkham influence is very noticeable. Combat lets you move between enemies rather than locking you into the simpler brawling of older LEGO games. Batman counters, dodges, uses gadgets, and moves through groups in a way that will feel extremely familiar to anyone who spent time with Rocksteady’s trilogy. Stealth is here too, alongside detective work and a ridiculous collection of gadgets; in a way, this game could easily have become Arkham with yellow heads. Instead, the LEGO systems keep popping up in the best possible way. You’re still smashing scenery into individual bricks. Characters still have abilities that open different routes or solve environmental puzzles. Studs explode across the floor whenever something breaks, and whatever serious Batman business I was doing becomes significantly less important because I spotted a valuable one rolling away; it seems years of LEGO games have trained me well. Batman can be pursuing one of Gotham’s most dangerous criminals, and I will still take a detour because somebody left a destructible bench nearby, because, you know, priorities. The important thing is that these two halves don’t feel stitched together. Arkham gives the game a stronger action foundation, while LEGO stops that foundation from becoming too serious, which might be the smartest thing TT Games does here. It doesn’t build a Batman game and then put LEGO on top; it essentially uses LEGO to reinterpret how a Batman game works, which is probably why I eventually started thinking about Hitman. But we’ll get there.
Gotham, but make it plastic
The same approach works with Gotham itself; it’s recognizable without becoming oppressive. There are familiar landmarks, crimes to interrupt, collectibles scattered everywhere, and enough verticality that moving across the city feels like part of the game and not simply some dead space between missions. Naturally, I spent a considerable amount of time gliding and slinging like Spider-Bat from rooftop to rooftop, and then I remembered there was a Batmobile. After that, public safety became somebody else’s problem, sorry, guys. Lander praised the amount of tiny visual detail in the Xbox Series X version, from reflections and rain to the actual texture of the LEGO pieces. I obviously wasn’t expecting the Switch 2 to match Microsoft’s considerably larger black rectangle in raw visual detail. What interested me was whether I’d actually notice the difference while playing; most of the time, I didn’t. The Switch 2 version looks genuinely good. Gotham remains dense enough to sell the idea, the characters look sharp, and the combination of glossy plastic surfaces, dramatic lighting, and Batman’s usual preference for standing somewhere unnecessarily dark translates nicely to the hardware. More importantly, it played smoothly throughout my time with it, which is actually where the Switch 2 version needed to succeed. An open-world Batman game loses quite a lot if gliding through Gotham turns into an intermittent slideshow, and the Arkham-inspired combat depends on responsiveness. Neither became an issue for me. There are naturally places where stronger platforms can push more detail, but I never had that experience of playing a port while constantly thinking about what was missing. Why? I was thinking about Batman and collecting studs; fine, I was mostly thinking about studs. Portable play also suits the LEGO side of the experience surprisingly well.
Story missions can become fairly substantial, but Gotham itself is full of smaller distractions that work perfectly when you only have a little time. Just one more crime, one more collectible, or a completely unnecessary Batmobile journey across the map, and before you know it, forty minutes have disappeared, which is the magic of LEGO.
The Batman museum where you’re allowed to punch things
Eventually, I stopped trying to identify every reference, mainly because there are too many. Costumes alone could probably send somebody down a Batman Wiki rabbit hole for an evening, and the vehicles, characters, locations, and recreated scenes constantly pull from different points in the character’s history. For bigger Batman fans, I suspect that’s going to be one of the main pleasures. For me, it worked differently; yes, I enjoyed recognizing what I did know and then realizing just how many Batmans exists beyond it. Eventually, the whole thing starts to feel almost like a playable Batman museum. Except this museum lets you punch the exhibits until they fall apart and then rewards you with money, but please don’t try this at your local museum. Although, admittedly, it would improve several museums I’ve visited. The humor helps prevent all that history from becoming reverential. This could easily have been a Batman greatest-hits compilation so obsessed with references that it forgot to be funny. Instead, some of its best jokes come from recreating something familiar and letting LEGO logic derail it. That’s why the writing landed for me even without decades of comic knowledge, mainly because the references are an extra layer. The jokes still work without the footnotes.
Fine, now make LEGO Hitman
Somewhere during all of this, Legacy of the Dark Knight accidentally convinced me that TT Games should start doing this to franchises that have absolutely no business becoming LEGO games. Because what they’ve done here isn’t really the traditional LEGO adaptation anymore; they’re not simply retelling a movie with minifigures. They’ve taken the mechanical identity of modern Batman games and asked how LEGO could change it. Which is far more interesting, so with that in mind, hear me out: LEGO Hitman. Agent 47 enters a heavily guarded building. Five minutes later, he’s wearing the exact same plastic hairpiece as the security guard currently unconscious inside a cupboard. Tell me that doesn’t work. Or LEGO Assassin’s Creed. Ezio climbs an enormous LEGO cathedral, synchronizes at the top, leaps dramatically into a haystack and sends forty yellow bricks and three terrified chickens flying across Florence; I would play that immediately. LEGO humor gives developers permission to exaggerate the mechanics we already associate with a franchise. Batman sneaking around criminals already borders on theatrical, and LEGO simply admits it, proving the same approach could work elsewhere. This probably isn’t the conclusion TT Games expected me to reach while playing their Batman game, but they brought it on themselves.
Conclusion
Maybe LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight was aimed at somebody like me more than I initially realized. I’m not the person who can identify every suit, and I don’t know the publication history of every villain. I’m still probably going to think “Catman? No, it’s Adam West from TV” at completely inappropriate moments, but I understand the version of Batman this game is created around. The one where Rocksteady made Gotham feel like a playground, and where LEGO can make fun of Batman precisely because everybody already knows how cool he’s supposed to be. TT Games has taken those ideas and built something that feels less like another LEGO adaptation and more like a celebration of how many different things Batman has been. The Switch 2 version doesn’t need to be the prettiest version to make that work, because it looks great, plays extremely well, and gives me a portable Gotham that I’m very happy to get lost in. And now I have another problem: I want to see what TT Games does if it applies the same idea somewhere completely different. So, once again: LEGO Hitman. Make it happen. Batman shows it can be done, and it left me craving more.