Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight Is More Than Just Plastic Arkham

It pains me to say that it has been over a decade since Arkham Knight launched and we’re still waiting for another truly excellent Batman game to take up its mantle. After Bruce Wayne-adjacent disappointments in Gotham Knights and Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, it’s understable why so many have seen Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight’s counter-based combat and immediately pinned their hopes on the line drawn between it and Rocksteady’s phenomenal trilogy.

The comparison is not unfair. After playing two-and-a-half hours at a recent preview event, it’s clear that Legacy of the Dark Knight is something of a “Diet Arkham”. I say that very much as a compliment; it’s got a similarly detailed open world with dozens of distractions, fun mission design, and robust combat – it’s just all much lighter, both in tone and mechanics, than its bigger, more photorealistic brother.

The preview demo featured three missions from across Lego Batman’s early campaign. The first had me pummelling my way through Penguin’s Iceberg Lounge in search of Carmine Falcone, a pursuit based on a sequence from Matt Reeves’ incredibly dark The Batman, but reenvisioned with brightly coloured ball pits, a QTE dance number, and a giant mechanical fist that punches doors off their hinges. Later, playing as The Boy Wonder himself, I balanced on tightropes and foiled Two-Face’s bombing attempt in a recreation of Batman Forever’s introduction to Robin. Rounding out the demo, I beat up monstrous plants in a multi-stage boss fight with Poison Ivy, whose minifigure is based on Batman & Robin’s Uma Thurman.

Across all three I was able to see a solid spectrum of what Legacy of the Dark Knight is capable of. My exploits in the Iceberg Lounge offered the best evidence that Lego Batman will provide for those seeking Arkham thrills – its frequent brawl pits had me beating goon minifigures into the dirt, with success practically assured thanks to decade-old muscle memory. It’s never any more advanced than Arkham’s baseline attack, dodge, and tap-to-counter system, with the Batarangs and grapple gadgets barely offering a deeper layer, but that core formula is undeniably one of the greatest combat systems we’ve ever had in video games, and it’s good to get back to it, even in this comparatively basic form.

While I fully expected the fisticuffs, I was surprised to discover that Lego Batman successfully tries its hand at Arkham’s predator-like stealth, too. While you don’t need to crouch and hold back on your speed, so long as you stay out of (the generously narrow) enemy vision cones, you can eliminate entire rooms of enemies one-by-one, often through the deployment of comedic takedowns, like giving them a noogie or hooking them up to a floating balloon.

While nothing I faced in the Iceberg Lounge or beyond posed much of a challenge, there are three difficulty options, maxing out at “Dark Knight” level, which turns off unlimited lives and throws more special enemies into the mix, such as towering bruisers or those armed with guns and shields. While I didn’t try this mode myself in the demo, it's the one I expect I’ll naturally gravitate to when I play the final release – the call of Arkham, even a plastic echo of it, is hard to ignore.

But it’s important to recognise that Legacy of the Dark Knight is more than just a shadow of Rocksteady’s giant, though, and that’s where the Haly's Circus mission comes in. Playing as Robin during his final performance as part of The Flying Graysons, it’s predominantly a platforming level. And while its array of zipwires and rotating jump points are basic when compared to Mario’s best gauntlets, it wasn’t the pushover that I expected. In its more challenging moments, where timed jumps and moving targets demand timing, I tripped up a couple of times due to overconfidence – there’s less magnet-like snapping to secure you in place than you’d expect from what is ostensibly a kid’s game.

The call of Arkham, even a plastic echo of it, is hard to ignore. The Poison Ivy boss fight swings the focus back to that slick combat system, but its multiple phases pull you in different directions. As bloom-headed minifigures do their best to distract you, Ivy herself is able to sprout a variety of flora that all demand different tricks to avoid, be that dodging exploding cacti, leaping over swinging vines, or yanking Ivy from atop a giant plant by using your grappling hook. Again, while this isn’t particularly challenging on the standard difficulty, it’s nonetheless absorbing thanks to the energetic pace and constant switching of attacks and appropriate reactions. I expect this to be particularly fun when played in co-op, especially alongside kids getting their first real taste of the Bat. Things shift gears again when Ivy summons her double-headed Snapdragon (presumably the final form of her snake-and-plant experiments from the movie) and a new set of attack patterns must be avoided, including jumping between giant leaves as they dissolve in acid.

I’ll admit that I’m no Lego game aficionado, and have spent little time with 2022’s Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, which saw developer TT Games push further into “traditional” video game territory. But I can certainly say that, across these missions, I was left with the sense that this is the best-feeling Lego game I’ve personally played. So far, it seems more fully formed and wider scoped than the bash-around fun Lego IP games of the early 2010s.

I suspect the real key to its success, though, will be its open world. Legacy of the Dark Knight takes place in a gorgeous rendition of Gotham City, which you’re free to prowl around between the main missions. Again, it owes at least a minimal debt to Rocksteady’s interpretation – its architecture, the way you navigate through it, and general moody atmosphere evoke Arkham Knight – but the wider palette of influences means there’s an array of fun billboards, shops, and other points of interest that evoke the art-deco Animated Series and a lifetime of cinema visions. Together, they feel cohesive, and create a very classic-feeling version of DC’s most important metropolis.

While the city’s footprint appears small when compared to “grown up” open worlds, it is generously peppered with activities and distractions. These, of course, include Riddler trophies, as well as their new sibling, the Cluemaster Puzzles, which, for example, ask you to seek out three items based on picture hints. Other classically-styled options include traversal and combat trials, unlocking fast travel points by fixing the SubWayne system, rescuing escaped zoo animals, and responding to the random crimes that occur across the city’s many streets and alleyways — yes, this is a Gotham with a bustling population of minifigure civilians, all ready to be mugged by a supervillain’s henchman.

While I poked around those familiar options, during my demo time I found myself more interested in The Falcone Fortune, a chain of side quests that sees you help Catwoman break into a series of apartments and rinse them of their valuables. Each property has a safe hidden behind a unique puzzle – you might need to piece together a key, spin statues into the correct alignment, or send an actual cat into small spaces to retrieve objects. Again, this is all relatively easy stuff, but I love the use of Catwoman’s unique abilities, from her glass-cutting claws to a wonderfully tactile safecracking minigame, which makes the whole event feel gleefully like cat burglary.

The real highlight of the open world, though, is bombing around Gotham in one of the many Batmobiles. The driving in Lego Batman is surprisingly good. The handling is arcadey without sacrificing weight. There’s a good sense of heft as you swing these goth motors around corners, and thundering through traffic feels fantastic – especially when you hammer the throttle and engage that iconic afterburner. Racing time trials provide a more structured goal for Wayne’s wheels, but for me the joy was in reliving the Batman fantasy of responding to crimes at 100mph. That’s only enhanced by the selection of bricky replicas, which in my demo included Tim Burton’s iconic 1989 land rocket, Nolan’s two-wheeled Batpod, the roaring muscle car of The Batman, and even the plastic monstrosity that Val Kilmer was saddled with in Batman Forever.

Yes, Legacy of the Dark Knight is very much equal opportunities when it comes to all flavours of the Caped Crusader (although I will note that the Batman & Robin suit arrives without nipples). It's this approach, rather than its co-opting of Arkham ideas, that I think not only defines it, but makes it worth paying attention to. By glueing together plastic recreations of the Dark Knight’s big-screen outings and re-telling them in a gorgeous open world, TT Games has created what appears to be a wonderful, joyful, and significant evolution of what Lego IP games have always been – movie tie-ins that let our inner seven-year-olds (or, indeed, our actual seven-year-olds) re-live the cinematic magic. By building atop the achievements of Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, The Legacy of the Dark Knight appears to be a new remix of the plastic brick’s ambitions, and it’s that which ultimately proves more interesting than its Arkham overlap.

Matt Purslow is IGN's Executive Editor of Features.