Featured Image Credit: Warner Bros. Games
It’s launch day for LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, with the caped crusader’s thrilling new adventure now available to enjoy across PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. Here at GAMINGbible, the title secured a rare perfect score of 10; this is easily both the best LEGO game to date and one of Batman’s most enjoyable video game outings.
“LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight wastes no time in proving it's a GOTY contender, hitting the ground running with its fast-paced, high-octane campaign,” our review states. “It pulls off a near-impossible balance of tonality, effortlessly imbuing the gritty world of DC’s famed caped crusader with LEGO’s trademark humour. In refining its formula, TT Games has crafted what is quite easily the best LEGO game to date and one of the Dark Knight’s strongest outings; it’s a true love letter to all things Batman.”
As you now embark on this journey yourself, you may be interested to hear from one of the masterminds behind the project. Luckily, we sat down with design director Jimmy Sedota who offered some insight on the game’s curated character roster which comprises just seven playable characters.
“We wanted to make sure that we were true to each of the playable characters and we wanted them to feel different and be a bit more unique,” Jimmy told us. “The Bat-Family is an important part of Batman and of that IP, so we wanted to make sure that came through in the moment to moment gameplay.”
He continued, “So [that looked like] providing things like unique gadgets and some unique abilities. Like Catwoman's the one who's going to crack a safe, not Gordon, right? And so that was a big part of it - just making sure that we could be true to the characters that we had. We wanted to provide more depth in our gameplay and more variety in our gameplay, and so we felt like this was the right way to do that, to ensure that things didn't get kind of stale and repetitive several hours into the game.
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“Always bringing in new members of the Bat-Family to mix up the mechanics and break things up a bit to keep things fresh, we thought that was really important versus having a lot of characters that all just did the same thing but looked different.”
It’s recently come to light that Rocksteady, the studio behind the famed Arkham Trilogy, served as a co-developer. Long before then though, LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight had been compared to that aforementioned franchise, something that proved to be a huge compliment to TT Games.
“It’s an honour to be honest,” Jimmy said of the Arkham Trilogy comparison. “Of course, we looked at it for reference. It's a great game. It makes you feel like Batman, right, just very easily mashing a button and you feel like Batman, so we definitely took it as a source of inspiration, but we did build this from the ground up for what we thought was the best LEGO Batman game, and so we made different choices to ensure that it was right for our audience.”
If you’re someone, like me, that spent upwards of 50-hours getting 100% completion on LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, you’ll instantly notice that LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight feels like a step up, with Jimmy explaining the biggest takeaways that came from that former project.
“The change in the camera and the change in the player's ability to use, you know, the different character abilities a little bit more freely,” Jimmy identified as two major developments. “We often talk about how we kind of modernise the action-adventure element, and so I think moving the camera and the gameplay mechanics that we had on The Skywalker Saga, that people loved and appreciated, let us know okay, this is a good direction for us to take, and we're not alienating our fans by tweaking the recipe of what makes a LEGO game a LEGO game.”
Our discussion moved onto the game’s plentiful side content, with the Riddler puzzles being a particular favourite of mine. If you’re curious to know how they compare to the Arkham Trilogy’s, you’re in luck.
“We tried to hit a wide spectrum, right?” Jimmy began. “Some of them are a little bit simpler, a little more straightforward, but that is an area where we also want some of those puzzles to make you kind of stop and think for a minute. We never wanted them to be too frustrating, obviously, or too challenging or annoying. I think the way that we approached it to ensure that it didn't have some of those issues was we tried to keep the gameplay variety wide, right?
“It's not like all the puzzles are just the same puzzle. There's a lot of variety in what you need to do using the different characters, the mechanics, but because it is, you know, optional, not for completionists but for somebody who's more interested in maybe the main story, we did feel for those as well as the other activities that it was okay to maybe make some of those a little bit of a higher challenge than, you know, others, so that was kind of our high level approach to them.”
Of course, the game is jam-packed with Easter eggs, references, and subtle nods both to various forms of Batman media but also wider pop culture. I asked Jimmy which secret in particular players should look out for.
“Easter eggs,” he replied. If you know, you know.
READ MORE: LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight’s Open-World Gotham Is GOTY Worthy
