Lego Batman

"A decent combo of bats and blocks!"

INTRO:
By now, most of us know about the lego/franchise mash-ups turned video game. It started with Lego Star Wars, then came Indiana Jones, and then we got this little number....Lego Batman.
If you played any of the aforementioned titles, you know that these games can't go wrong...for the most part.

STORY:
Nothing too complicated here. The story in this version of batman seems to draw from a combination of the first two Tim Burton movies and some of the animated series from the 90's. You basically play through 3 different mini stories (each with its own main villain), with 5 chapters a piece.

GAMEPLAY:
Ah, the part that makes or breaks the game. Well, as with the other Lego games, Batman plays very smoothly. You have an action, attack, jump and switch button. Seems very basic, but it works very well. Like mentioned above, you start the game with 3 stories available and once you complete any chapter, you unlock it's respective villian half. Thats right, you get a total of 30 different levels to play throughout the main part of the game. One change from the star wars series is the reduction of your "party". You only have two total characters to use at a time. It actualy doesnt make it less enjoyable because now Batman and Robin have different suits to acess different areas. So, you kind of feel like you have an entire batcave at your disposal. Another change from the star wars series (which is actually an improvement), is how they worked stud collecting. Just like in other games, one part of this game is to collect a certain amount of studs to obtain "super-hero" or "super-villian" status. Well, in this game you can do this in either story mode or free play mode(versus having to do it in both to get 100%). For those who dont know, Free Play is unlocked for each lever after defeating it's respective story mode. So now you can go back with all your different suit upgrades and collect them even easier.

On the downside, alot of the extras you can unlock in this game do not become available until you get near or even to the end of the game, making them rather useless. There are also way too many characters that have little or no use. It seems like they put alot of filler characters. To make it worse, when you enter Free Play mode, they are automatically put in you roster, so now you have ALOT of characters to flip through when trying to find the one you need.

One last thought on gameplay is that they realy didnt highlight the create-a-character feature at all. I actually stumbled across it by accident, and its very weak compared to other instances.

SOUND:
The sound in this game is excellent. The soundtrack is that of Danny Elfman's score for the 1989 movie. The sound effects are still the common sounds of the Lego games. The only set-back is that some of the sounds seem to be really down-sampled this time around. Meaning they sound muffled and rough but nothing to detour you from playing.

GRAPHICS:
Well, we're talking about animated Legos here, so in that aspect, they are very well done. The backgrounds are also very well detailed as well.

PLAY TIME/ REPLAYABILITY:
Well, here's where it starts to lose it's magic. Yes, there are 30 main levels to play(with some extra ones too), but when you consider that you have to play through them all twice...that adds up to some tedious game-time. After you play through and unlock all the pointless extras, you'll never wanna touch it again (at least not for a while).

FINAL THOUGHTS
Overall this is a decent game to just mess around with. You'll love the exploration of new areas once you use other abilities, the amount of levels this time around, the colorful cast of familiar characters and the wonderful soundtrack. Unfortunately you my hate having to play through all 30 levels twice, the lame extras and suit upgrades and the lateness is the game that the more important ones appear. All in all this game matches the charm of the rest of the Lego series and if you can find it for less than 20 dollars, it's a good deal. If not, just rent it for a week.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 07/23/09

Game Release: Lego Batman (US, 09/23/08)