Look: Like many of you, I have suffered from Lego fatigue. No matter how much I might care about Avengers or Lord of the Rings or Indiana Jones or any of the other properties Lego has adapted over the years, there have been so many Lego games, each of them with so much to do. It was impossible to keep up or sustain my interest.
But Lego franchise games seem to have turned a corner now, as Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga was a nicely refreshed take on the entire series, even as it retained the core Lego game collectathon loop. Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight looks to be an even greater departure, standing firmly on a love of Batman across all his media incarnations.
At first, Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight looks to be an anthology of various Lego-ized Batman movies similar to Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, but even that isn’t quite right. It would be more accurate to call it a fusion of Batman movies, alongside other influences and stories, to build something new and original from all of its various parts. In that way, it’s perfectly Lego.
For example, the story mission I played at Gamescom took place in Axis Chemicals, which fans of the 1989 Michael Keaton movie will immediately recognize as the birthplace of the Joker. But instead of gangster sociopath Jack Napier being dispatched to destroy incriminating evidence in the chemical plant (but with the situation becoming a setup to kill him for sleeping with the boss’ moll), it’s Red Hood #1, leader of the Red Hood Gang, as we’ve seen serve as the Joker origin story in some comic iterations. Red Hood is using the factory to manufacture a strange new compound that makes its victims laugh uncontrollably until they die. Under the hood is an unmistakable (and very passable) Jack Nicholson impression, so the character is not not the Batman ’89 Joker, but he’s been blended with other stories.
Likewise, the Batman who confronts him, at least in this demo, was the Robert Pattinson iteration of the character, accompanied by a Jim Gordon who looks very much like a Lego Jeffrey Wright, each of them from the 2022 film The Batman.
This mixing and matching of various great moments from Batman cinematic history is core to the spirit of Legacy of the Dark Knight, which sets the ambitious target of weaving elements of all of the Batman movies with other media into a single coherent story. When asked what that means for recurring characters played by different actors like the Joker, TT Games’ Jonathan Smith told GameSpot that perhaps some terrible things will happen to the Joker that will make him even more sinister and–presumably, but left unsaid–more like Heath Ledger’s incarnation in The Dark Knight.
That same sense of playfulness extends to the Easter eggs, which have always been a Lego staple but feel more focused here. Rather than collecting a hundred doodads to unlock 200 different but mechanically identical characters, you’re unlocking deep-cut styles for Batman and Commissioner Gordon. Those include some you’d expect, like iconic movie appearances, alongside some you might not. Batman looked especially great in his Brave and the Bold costume modeled after the 2008 cartoon show.
Both Batman and Gordon have looks based on their very first comic appearances, including Bats’ dopey big cowl ears and Gordon’s white suit and wispy mustache. The most surprising was Batman’s Rainbow Suit, a fully rendered Lego version of a classic and extremely goofy Silver Age comic book that has received iconic camp status.
But not content to borrow solely from great Batman movies, Legacy of the Dark Knight also borrows from great Batman games. The combat is clearly inspired by the Arkham series, as Batman can perform stealth takedowns of unsuspecting Lego enemies or jump into the middle of a brawl with timing-based combat. This is simplified in some ways–the timing windows are wider and the visual indicators are bigger than in the Arkham games, and you only have two gadgets to use in fights. But it feels like an affectionate homage to mechanics that have become as central to the character as any movie, in the minds of Arkham fans. Legacy of the Dark Knight also introduces difficulty levels, letting younger or less-experienced players THWACK and POW like Batman, while giving more experienced Arkham fans more and tougher enemies to fight and, for the first time I remember, a limited pool of lives to spend on encounters.
And like the later Arkham games, the hub world is a wide-open Gotham City that can be explored freely. You can stop crimes, find Bat caches, smash collectibles like Penguin rubber duckies, and skulk along the rooftops or gracefully glide between them. You can zip-line your way up to gain speed and then float, and if you’ve built up enough energy from beating down thugs, you can launch even higher into the air to get a birds-eye view of the city. If going ground-level is more your style, you can summon a Batmobile anywhere in the open world. I only saw the Robert Pattinson muscle car iteration from The Batman in my demo, but TT Games has already teased many more Batmobiles to come, and they can be freely equipped like Batman and Gordon’s costumes.
I didn’t really know what to expect next out of TT Games after The Skywalker Saga, but Legacy of the Dark Knight is such a pleasant surprise. When you’re finished building a Lego set, you might take it apart and see what else you can make from all the pieces. TT Games looks to be doing that with the Batman mythos, and I can’t wait to see what they build out of it.
