

It’s only when the story is complete that you get full run of Gotham to solve hidden puzzles, collect items and unlock characters, but this isn’t going to be of any interest to those players who don’t get itchy at the thought of 100% completion. As the story mode progresses your ability to travel the map and explore gets, oddly enough, more inhibited as your vehicles and flight abilities are limited. In Lego Batman it’s little more than a mission hub, seeing Batman and Robin travelng from Point A to Point B for the purpose of starting the next self-contained level that bears no relation to world map. Whilst a game like Grand Theft Auto, which wrote the book on gaming sandboxes, would treat the map as an explorable world filled with distractions and side-missions, and the story missions would take place in the same map. Less successful is the utilization of the sandbox gameplay. The exchanges between a sullen Batman and smug Superman are especially awesome as they play to the character dynamic to a tee. Surprisingly the switch to voice work has made this the funniest game in the series with some downright brilliant writing. They’ve always had a fun charm to them with the silly over-acting being the source of much of the games humour, especially when it comes to the material from Indiana Jones and Pirates of the Caribbean that may not have been suitable for the younger gamers.


When it comes to the inclusion of the voices for the characters, it takes away the wacky mime routines that the Lego games have used in the past. “We’ve finally caught up with voice acting. Telltale have also heavily promoted the fact that the characters can talk now, bringing the series on a par with gaming breakthroughs over a decade past. This entry also promised quite big changes with a sandbox Gotham replacing the usual level hub and the full cast of the Justice League appearing as playable characters. Part of the reason in this case is because it’s Batman, and that’s reason enough to give anything a bash. Yet, for some reason, I’m still playing them… After four Star Wars titles, two Batman, two Harry Potter two Indiana Jones and a Pirates of the Caribbean the simple pleasure seeing tiny little Lego versions of our favourite stories miming their way through levels more about collectables than gameplay has diminished. One could reasonably argue that the Lego gaming franchise has pushed the gimmick way beyond the realm of ‘novelty’, which is what the original few games in the franchise felt like. Review: And so we once again enter the world of small plastic bricks. Platform: PS3, X-Box 360, Vita, DS, 3DS, Wii, Windows
