So I know what you are thinking. Why the hell is high brow Golgotron publishing a review for a game that came out in the Fall of 2008? The answer is that Best Buy gave me a free copy of the game with my new Xbox and I couldn’t sell it on Ebay because it was packaged in a paper sleeve. Ok well that is part of it but the other reason is because it is actually a pretty decent game for $10 bucks (or free).
I’m going to switch things up here a bit though and tell you why this game sucks first. If you have played anything else from the LEGO series (Star Wars, Indiana Jones, or Harry Potter) then you pretty much know what to expect here. LEGO Batman is a kids game in which you can’t die in the game. The worst thing that happens when you run out of hearts or fall off a cliff is lose points. All of games are cheesy, button mashing, beat’em ups. LEGO Batman is however completely broken and often times provides little direction for what you are supposed to do next. There are 30 plus levels in the game and I had to restart a bunch of them because event triggers didn’t happen when they were supposed to and you couldn’t move on to the next part of the level. And if the levels weren’t broken, many times there is no indication of what you need to do next in order to unlock a door to move into the next section of a level. This is a kids game and even I was left scratching my head in some levels. Even Bejeweled is kind enough to give you a little sparkle when you can’t see the next move you need to make. These are the kinds of things that you expect to see in Wii shovelware titles or in the Beta version of a game but not something backed by the LEGO and DC Comics brands. It comes off as lazy but in this case it was just rushed to get into stores for the holiday season.
Once you get past the defects of the game, there is a good old fashion video game in here. This game reminded me of when I was a kid getting up on Saturday morning to eat Lucky Charms and watch cartoons. There is no story worth mentioning here and there is nothing wrong with that. LEGO Batman is a welcome break from power leveling, online competition, character development, and flailing your arms with a Wiimote. And as I said before, even though some of them are broken, there are 30 plus levels in this game. The first 15 are played as Batman and Robin and the second 15 are villain mode with the Joker, Penguin, Catwoman, Bain, and just about every other bad guy from the Batman universe. The game play gets shaken up a little bit as Batman and Robin have different super powers that you can unlock and each villain has their own ability. This is a simple game that most likely could have been done on the original Playstation or even a Nintendo 64.
LEGO Batman is an achievement whore’s dream and a completionist’s nightmare. There is so much re-playability built into this game because of the process of unlocking extra characters. If you want to gather all the hidden items to unlock all the special abilities, you have to go back and replay the levels once you have unlocked the right super power or villain. For example you need to unlock Catwoman so you can double jump to get up to the higher ledges. All the achievements are built around gathering all these hidden items and getting the high score for all these levels. The problem for the completionist is that this is going to take forever as there are 10 hidden Bat-packs in all 30 levels and you have to get all of them to unlock all the in game extras. Either way though, this game was built to be able to pick it up and put it down like the games you played on Genesis or Super Nintendo.
So there you have it. Go out to your mom and pop game store and pick this up. Even though parts of the game are completely broken, the amount of gameplay and fun that you are going to have with the rest of the game is well worth the $10 price of admission. LEGO Batman is a great little game that you can pick up and put down without having to stress out about getting to the next save point or improving your online ranking.