To The Batmobile!

So, Lego Batman is in the same mould as Lego Star Wars and Lego Indy and for the most part that’s great.

The amount of drive, effort and coordination required to complete the game may put off a few gamers completely or make most people abandon the game at just 25 percent complete, but it does have perks too. There’s a lot of content here to unearth for instance, and the platforming shell means the game is kept on an accessible level that’ll make it a great game to play with younger children.

Unfortunately, there are some cracks that begin to show too as the series of Lego games goes on. While the base may be made of something strong, blocky and sturdy like Duplo, parts of the game are a lot more fiddly and unintuitive, like Meccano.

Take the platforming aspect of the game for example, which is the most basic building block of the entire game. The basic controls for running and jumping are easy to get your head around, but the actual on-screen actions generally feel a little sticky, laggy and disappointing. You can jump very far or very accurately.


For the first games, this wasn’t a huge problem however as the Lego Star Wars managed to sell and appeal on a novelty level. It was also pretty damn funny and all good journalists know that a good joke can hide even the worst sins.

The humour now though is starting to feel staid and predictable to those who’ve played any of the previous games, mainly because there’s only so many jokes you can make when all your characters are mute. That old rib-tickler that Harry always tells about washing the gimp, for example? Wouldn’t exactly fit in.

As a result, much of the humour in the game is derived from either the cuteness or clumsiness of the characters, with Robin constantly dropping things to raise laugh while Batman grumbles on. It isn’t that it’s especially unfunny of course, some of it is enough to actually raise a chortle even from our cynical old souls, but it is something we’ve seen before in all the previous Lego games.

It’s the law of diminishing returns and the game suffers because there aren’t enough well-known scenes in the Batman world for there to be any really worthy parodies.


Other areas of the game haven’t been polished enough either. The vehicle sections for example are still pretty awful to be frank, with cars that are awkward to control, fiddly to steer and levels that are just plain boring.

The car-based sections of the game are handled in one of two ways and neither of them are all that great. You’ve either got cars in the regular side-on levels, where they handle as awfully as they did in Lego Indy, or you have the new and much more open vehicle-centric levels. The main difference between the two though is that the view is more zoomed out and in the latter you can’t get yourself out of your car.

To be fair, it isn’t wholly unrewarding when you’re driving a car. The Batmobile levels do have some deep-buried level of charm as you use your blasters and grapple hooks to, but the repetitiveness undermines this eventually, as do the controls which are about as smooth and pleasurable as defecating a bag full of Lego bricks.

It’s a dreadful shame really because driving the Batmobile, Batbike and so on should be one of the highlights of the game. It doesn’t have to be clever and super-innovative, it just has to be exciting and enjoyable and there are plenty of excellent ways that the vehicles could have been redesigned easily to fit these criteria perfectly, like a pair of Lego bricks that are very much in love.