If you’re a gamer and you aren’t familiar with the LEGO games, you may have been living in a cave. Even if you’ve never played one, which you really should, you’ve probably heard of them in some shape or form. TT Games releases one or two a year, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham follows your favourite DC superheroes, Batman, Robin, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Cyborg and the Flash, as they team up with a motley crew of villains to stop Brainiac. The story falls into the background, though, as entertaining gameplay, puzzles and humorous scenes take focus, and exploring the Gotham of LEGO Batman 2 has been replaced with a space station and several other areas, including the Batcave.
If you’ve played a LEGO game, you’ll be instantly familiar with the formula, which hasn’t changed much since TT Games started with LEGO Star Wars. Every character has different abilities, flying, heat vision, large size, grappling hook, and so on, that you must use to progress, with most characters having more than one. That’s both good and bad: the formula is great, but it has seen nothing more than tiny revisions over the years. More of the same isn’t necessarily bad, though. Batman, Cyborg, Robin and others have numerous suits to get through levels, which means less switching between characters and lets you stick with a favourite more often, even if switching is still required, and different levels hand you two or more characters and mix things up enough to stay fresh.
Some minor changes have genuinely improved things. When you’re near an area that needs a different suit than you’re wearing, one button now swaps suits without bringing up the selection wheel, and some characters who can’t throw objects can instead raise an aiming reticle and lunge at targets. Small, but appreciated tweaks that show TT Games has refined its set formula for the better. Plenty of humour can be found here, just like the other LEGO games: children will love the cut-scenes and adults should too, I found the portrayal of the Flash particularly funny, and there are several cameos from real-life celebrities turned into minifigures, including an odd but enjoyable one from a late-night talk-show host, which I won’t spoil.
The music is cinema quality, especially notable when you take to the air as Superman or Wonder Woman and the original scores from their respective movies or shows play, and the voice work is excellent, with characters that match their looks and personalities, though I did find myself missing Will Arnett’s Batman from The LEGO Movie. Once the story is done, as with every LEGO game, you can switch to any character, and there’s still so much to do: freeplay missions, gold bricks, red cheat bricks, unlocking every character. I found several areas I hadn’t been aware of after finishing, including small planets to fly around, and was really impressed by one of them.
The game is also fairly bug-free compared with some of TT Games’ other releases, I was pleasantly surprised, and can’t remember a LEGO game running this smoothly. On that note, little has changed with the camera, and there were parts where I couldn’t see or find my character because the camera was focused on someone or something else, and you still can’t pull up a list of characters, a minor annoyance that makes finding the right one to switch to tricky when four are in your party. Quibbles aside, it’s polished, funny and stuffed with content, another confident, cosmic LEGO romp.
