Adventure Corner ~ LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight

Welcome to Adventure Corner, a column where members of the RPGamer staff can give their thoughts, impressions, and pseudo-reviews for various adventure titles that don’t come under our usual coverage. Adventure Corner is aimed at delivering opinions on a wide range of titles including visual novels, point-and-click adventures, investigative mysteries, and so forth.

In this edition of the column we take a look at TT Games’s LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, where eighty-six years of Batman history gets squeezed into a single love letter.

The LEGO games were something that I missed entirely while growing up, so I don’t have any real history with them. However, The LEGO Batman Movie is one of the best Batman movies out there, and when Legacy of the Dark Knight was announced, that was enough for me to finally jump in. For the most part, it delivered on what it promised: a Batman game that takes the character seriously without losing the humor, with an open world worth actually spending time in. There are a few areas where it falls short, but more often than not, it exceeds expectations.

Legacy of the Dark Knight is an open-world action-adventure weaving 86 years of Batman history into a single original story. The game opens with a young Bruce watching his parents get shot dead in Crime Alley, then follows him leaving Gotham to train with the League of Shadows under Ra’s al Ghul, climbing to the peaks of Nanda Parbat alongside Talia. When he eventually returns and descends into the cave beneath Wayne Manor, the one he fell into as a child and feared thereafter, the decision to become Batman is quiet and earned. This origin is what the Arkham games, brilliant as they are, never did. They picked up a Batman who was already complete, already feared, and that confidence is part of what made them great. But the man underneath the suit always stayed at a distance. Legacy of the Dark Knight closes that distance.

A kid looking for his costume in the garden, completely unaware of what comes next.

The combat takes its cues directly from the Arkham blueprint: fluid chains, counter-timing, gadget interrupts, and finishers that reward reading the room. Each of the seven playable characters handles differently enough to matter. Batman has his Batclaw that yanks enemies toward him, Catwoman uses her whip and can send a cat to hard-to-reach spots, Batgirl has a mobile grapple drone, and Nightwing brings electrified gadgets. Three difficulty tiers, including a Dark Knight mode with finite lives, mean the system can push back as hard as needed. It all clicks from the first encounter. Stealth does not hold up the same way, however. These sections are either too generous or too clustered to engage with meaningfully, and some enemy detection issues on higher difficulties suggest it was not the priority everything else clearly was.

The Batcave is where the game’s obsession with Batman history becomes most tangible. It starts as a mostly empty space and gradually fills up across the entire playthrough, expanding through four unlockable areas that can be decorated with over 250 trophies and props. The Suit Vault holds 100 outfits spanning every era of Batman media, from the 1939 Detective Comics Golden Age suit through to the Arkham trilogy, sitting alongside a garage of over 20 vehicles, including twelve Batmobiles each pulled from a different point in the character’s history.

The streets were not going to clean themselves.

Gotham spans four densely packed islands built on Unreal Engine 5, and the optimization makes the open world more stable than many other recent UE5 titles. There are some traversal stutters on PC, and the PS5 performance mode gets jittery in busy combat, but it never tips into unplayable territory. That said, the game is riddled with bugs, and it will be common for players to find themselves stuck and loading their last checkpoint more often than they should.

Gotham feels like a city worth actually exploring, largely because there is always a reason to stay in it longer than one might originally plan. Each of the four islands looks different enough that moving between them never gets old, and trying out a different Batmobile, gliding between districts, or grappling across rooftops just to see what is around the next corner makes fast travel feel like a waste. The game essentially forces exploration before shortcuts anyway, since unlocking fast travel requires solving riddles first. Street crimes, Cluemaster challenges, vehicle races, and Bat-Symbols hidden with zero map indication give the open world enough variety that it never starts feeling hollow, and the traversal alone is good enough that none of that extra content even needs to be touched for Gotham to feel worth spending time in.

Gotham has no right looking this good in LEGO form.

The game is funny without ever feeling like it is trying to be. It is silly in the best way, the kind that gets a real laugh without the game ever desperately nudging for one. A construction worker using an orange brick separator to clean up after a fight, Condiment King showing up with complete sincerity, Batman’s shark repellent getting the same treatment as any serious gadget: it all lands because the world around it earns the jokes rather than leaning on them. What makes it work is that the game knows when to pull back too. The serious moments are serious, and nothing ever gets diffused with a wink at the wrong time.

The Arkham trilogy never really cared about anyone other than Batman, and after a while that starts to show. Legacy of the Dark Knight gives the people around him room to exist, and the story is better for it: Jim Gordon, Robin, Nightwing, Batgirl, and Catwoman each have their own arc that feeds into the larger story rather than just filling a roster. Starting from a young Bruce in Crime Alley and following him all the way through gives the whole thing an emotional grounding the Arkham games never had. The open world is more alive, the humor is something the Arkham games never attempted, and the sheer ambition of what TT Games pulled off here is unlike anything the franchise has seen in a game before. The villains are a step below what the Arkham trilogy pulled off, the bugs will test patience, and the performance issues are real. However, the ambition of Legacy of the Dark Knight very much works in its favor, and it feels like the title is appropriate in all the ways that matter.