Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight's story takes place mainly throughout the entire movie series beginning with the one that starred Michael Keaton in 1989. There's a little bit of a mix with older shows and the Rocksteady games as well but it's mostly the newer movie series up until now, excluding Batman vs. Superman. It does have the Affleck Batsuit and Batmobile though.
I started Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight on the hardest difficulty because I knew and expected that even on the hardest difficulty that it would likely play out as a Normal difficulty would be for most games and I was correct. I've played a few Lego games over the past several years that I really enjoyed including Lego City Undercover and The Skywalker Saga so I knew mostly what to expect as far as difficulty with the combat itself. Some of the combat encounters are more difficult than others and I even lost lives a couple of times but for any player used to the Batman Arkham series, you should have no trouble with this. For younger and newer gamers, I imagine it should be very accessible and a good early gaming experience especially with the various accessibility options.
One of the Accessibility options I went with was to disable QTEs. The last game that I can remember that had exceptional QTEs were the original God of War trilogy. Most games just have you press a single key at a time or mash a button. God of War 2005 had you do multiple presses at different times for ongoing cinematic action events. It was really cool and offered in-game events that are otherwise impossible to experience. Since most games don't do that, I've started to disable QTEs when the option is available. Some of the cinematics in Legacy of the Dark Knight where it was obvious there would be QTEs looked like they might actually be cool to interact with but I was fine with just watching them as a movie instead. I also disabled Stud loss upon death. There are a lot of good gameplay and accessibility options so be sure to check them out.
As far as puzzles, some of them can actually be pretty tricky or advanced, annoyingly so. The most annoying ones to me are the ones you simply can't access right away and for a long time because you need to progress deeper into the campaign to unlock the characters to access those puzzles. I don't like that system. If I can come across a puzzle, I would like to be able to actually solve it right away, not be forced to come back later. This is just a complaint out of preference, the game design does make sense to me and I do enjoy the progression system itself. At least in this case it's mostly obvious that you have to gain access to a gadget or character that you don't already have access to in order to solve that particular puzzle. A little X symbol or a Lock icon means that you have to come back later. I really enjoyed Batgirl's hackarang and Catwoman's lock picking mechanics for these puzzles. Batgirl's drone was also neat. They're super easy being a kid's game and all but very fun. Always remember to destroy everything, it's the Lego way (well, and most action games' way).
Being an Arkham styled game, it's overloaded with freakin Riddler puzzles, man. At least most of these are fun and far easier to deal with than they were in the actual Arkham series. I couldn't stand most of those. I liked the zoo animal missions, they're cute.
Legacy of the Dark Knight also has AR missions just like the Batman Arkham series had. There are ground races, gliding races, and combat missions. I don't think they did any stealth focused ones, though. I've mostly focused on the races so far because they're so much fun to me! The controls are a bit rough for some of the more precise gliding missions which just means they take extra tries to get down well. The driving races also sometimes have some tricky turns to take. It's cool that even for me some of these offered a bit more extra challenge. The vehicles also have their own handling. I was not expecting that in a Lego game. The first batcycle actually handles pretty terribly in comparison to other vehicles. A handbrake would have been nice to have. 😊
In combat, the first thing I noticed is that Batman doesn't have a manual cape stun in this game. What's interesting about that is that Catwoman does, she doesn't use the cape but she summons a cat and cats to stun the enemy and then can perform a beatdown. It's hilarious and epic. Batman's batarangs can stun opponents after multiple hits but it does suck that you can't just do it manually right away. Nightwing's electrified batarang is the most overpowered especially since it can chain into multiple enemies at a time. Each character has their own playstyle, weapons, and skill trees for abilities as well as their weapons. Eventually you unlock chain stealth takedowns so that is super cool. One thing I thought was a little funny is that you can dodge roll through items to smash them instead of meleeing or shooting them, kind of like Soulslike spam rolling.
There's quite a bit of character customization, sort of. There are a lot of unlockables including suits but also color palettes for the suits as well. Sadly, most of the character's suits almost look identical with the tiniest variation so that is annoying but the color palettes at least make it so there's a bit more to work with. Unfortunately, there's no black "mod" to unlock for the color palettes so you can't actually make any of the suits that have a lot of color by default look darker instead. That would have been cool but there are plenty of fun and different cool styles to play with.
The Bat Cave is freakin amazing! I was not expecting it to be so huge, especially after upgrades. I also was not expecting it to be so customizable. Throughout the game you earn different things that you can place around your cave and you can also buy a lot of things from the Bat-Mite store with Studs. The odd thing about that is the way things are made available to you. The store seems to randomly change what you can buy at different times, switching out which items are available. Each time you buy an item, it is replaced by a new one. I only bought the ones on display that I was interested in while ignoring the rest that were on display. My intent is to buy every single thing eventually but I only buy the things I actually want right away. The only thing I bought right away were the costumes. Those you can't really pick, either. A new costume will appear every time you buy one until none are available. Most costumes show up in the store as you unlock each character but some require progress in the game and completing puzzles to unlock.
For the Bat Cave specifically, there are different areas in the zone that allow you to place statues and furniture and stuff. Every time you open up a new part of the cave, the game defaults a few items to demonstrate a specific theme of what you might want to decorate with. You can delete and replace items. This is never a feature I really spend a lot of time with but I'm still always impressed when I see so many options available. Same happened with Hogwarts Legacy and Assassin's Creed Shadows, incredible stuff.
No spoiler: While I enjoyed the story as a whole in Legacy of the Dark Knight as it spanned over most of the movies, I was actually really disappointed with the ending. The final boss was incredible and new, I hadn't seen anything like that before in these games, not gameplay mechanics wise but just the character design and stuff. That was really dang cool. But the story just kind of ends. lol It's cute and over. I dunno why exactly but I liked that they used the song by Seal for the credits and even in their launch trailer. It's a pretty song.
There Are So Many Bugs
Fortunately, most bugs can be fixed with a simple reload checkpoint but I have seen some players post on the forums that reloading the checkpoint and verifying files (Steam) did not fix the issue and it worked after reinstalling the game. Yeesh. My personal least favorite bug is involved with remapping the keybinds on PC. Once remapped, aiming specifically with Batman, not the other characters, and specifically with his main gadget, the batarang, just doesn't work. I can aim with him but he won't throw the batarang. It happens constantly! This is one of the most easily reproducible bugs I've ever seen. At some point I just plugged in my controller and I switch to it briefly for those puzzle parts where I need it. Also, it may be connected to the Toggle Aim option but I'm not fully sure, I didn't do a lot of testing with that specifically. It was just super buggy. When toggling aim with the key rebound, it would just auto spam aim and un-aim (is that a word? I guess now it is.)
Another thing I came across was being unable to use Photo Mode in certain areas. I have to assume it's a bug cuz it would happen in places that didn't make sense. The first time I encountered it I assumed maybe it was to avoid spoilers but it also seems to happen in the most random areas. I also don't like that you can't open Photo Mode during most finishers. You know how the finisher moves are kind of cinematic? It's always annoying when you can't use photo mode during that. A lot of games do this for some reason. I guess technical issues but sometimes I just wonder if it's an oversight. Easily some of the best moments to take a photo would be during a finisher!
Related to the accessibility options, toggle keybind for actions is also tied to driving mechanics. So, you know how in some games with this option you can press a button a single time rather than have to mash it? With that option enabled in this game, it means you are forced to toggle Accelerate and Reverse while in a vehicle. I ended up just getting used to that because I quickly got sick and tired of disabling the option every time I wanted to do a racing challenge so I did send them some feedback saying it would be better to separate the driving mechanics from that Toggle option. It's mostly only trickier for the harder turns but it is easy to get used to if you really want to which I did. Seriously, disabling and re-enabling toggle every time I wanted to do a race got old real fast.
Lastly, for me, every single time I load back into the game, the costumes for each of my characters has randomly changed. I'm not sure what exactly it's doing. I think it's reloading a previous save checkpoint with the different costumes that I had on during the game checkpoint rather than the ones I had equipped when Saving and Quitting the game. It's annoying. I believe my game progress saves correctly, just not the costumes.
There are a lot of bugs in the game, from what I've experienced and seen they are mostly not game breaking. Like I said though, some people said they literally had to uninstall and reinstall the game to get things to work properly. I don't know if that is the actual fix or if they should have just tried reloading the checkpoint again. If you want to be aware of a lot of the bugs going on, you can check out the official site to browse through reported bugs. It's a little funny to me that a lot of the "top" reported bugs are the most stupid ones.
Final Thoughts
Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight has a pretty awesome amount of content via a various amount of puzzle types and racing and combat missions. The graphics are gorgeous... which reminds me, I didn't have any performance issues really. I noticed here and there a couple very tiny visual glitchy blips but it only happened three or four times at the beginning and and I hadn't noticed it since then. I have a really good PC, though, that will soon be outdated. I play in 1080p with a 60 fps cap. As far as the price, it's hard for me to say. I think it's a bit short for being an open world game, heck, it's actually shorter than The Skywalker Saga so that alone is a bit disappointing. I picked up the deluxe edition (USA) from loaded (previously cdkeys) for cheaper than the base game price. I can't help but think it makes sense to wait for a sale simply because of how short I think it is.
Look, thirty hours is a decent amount of game time and I might even get twenty-ish more hours out of it from collecting everything and I will probably even replay the whole story again but it's still a lot of money (for us "peasants"). 😉 The quality of the game itself is excellent, excluding bugs of course. The story was fun with a lot of characters and boss fights, the game mechanics are fun, most of the puzzles and activities are fun with some excruciatingly but very rare frustrating points. It's a great game. There is a player that 100% everything with 28 hours played. I have to think he used guides for everything somehow or something. lol But I do spend a bit of my time in Photo Mode as well and I like to just explore and waste time smashing stuff.
I've shared some screenshots on reddit here and here if you wanna check them out. I have a whole lot more on my discord. Thanks for reading. Game on.
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