Lego has enjoyed a huge success with their Lego Star Wars set, and have expanded out in other games as well, Lego Rock Band, Lego Indiana Jones, and an upcoming Lego Harry Potter all ring to mind. I'd only ever played the Lego Star Wars games, but when I saw a friend getting ready to pawn it, I wanted to take it for a quick spin. While not as clean as Star Wars was from a memory stand point, Batman was entertaining enough to keep me going, but probably should have stopped before it all ran thin.
The game starts you off with control over Batman and Robin, and that's it. As you progress through the levels, they get new costumes, but in the end, they liked coming back to the same two, a suit where Batman can blow things up, and a suit where Robin can walk up certain walls. There's only so much variety that can come of the two. Two more interesting suits that hardly see the light of day, a flame suit for Batman, and a diving suit for Robin, really don't get used to their full potential, at least in the Story Mode.
Speaking of which, Story Mode and Free Play are both back per usual, with 3 levels for the Heroes, and 3 levels for the villains. While the villains have far more interesting level design, as they're tailored to each of the 2 man groups that will play in it, they all lack the explosive endings that (most) of the Batman levels had. Hero boss fights consist of Batman fighting the villains, whereas on the villain side, you will sometimes get a police vehicle to fight against as a boss. In fact, if you play through the Hero side then the Villain side as I did, the last thing you do in the game is assemble a contraption to stand on, then stand on it, and the game ends. It would have been nice to give a nod to the villains and let them duke it out with Batman at the end to get a different ending.
A few complaints that I had about the game would be that the control was too loose for what is effectively a platformer. They made this game more vertical, which means that some jumps are a bit hard to make, and if you're off by a bit, it doesn't always give you much room to recover in. Secondly, the music to the game was taken straight from Tim Burton's Batman movie in the 90's, and while I very much enjoyed that, too much of it repeats between the levels, making me not like it so much anymore. Lastly, the level selection screens (Batcave and Arkham) are terribly done, hard to get between areas, and made me not want to finish the villain side. I always had to start as Batman, work my way through the cave, and then select villains, and then move to their level selection screen. Annoying.
My recommendation on this one is going to be a pass unless you have younger batman lovers in the house. I could very much see a Parent / child thing here and think both people would have some fun. Slogging through it alone as I did, there's better ways to spend your time.
