Traveller’s Tales returns to Gotham with their love letter to the caped crusader in LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight. In doing so, they’ve refined the LEGO game formula creating the best experience yet, although it may feel diminished in some areas. However, they’ve crafted a loving game for the world’s greatest detective and one that fans of the character should absolutely find time to play.

LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight pulls influence throughout the history of the character. While the story itself focuses mainly on the movies, you’ll find plenty of nods elsewhere. Cutscenes may reference a certain beloved animated show, there may be a red phone in the batcave you can answer, and finding villains that might be worth a Google are found aplenty in the game. That’s not even acknowledging posters, billboards, name drops, and more. As a Batman fan, there was a ton here that put a smile on my face.

The story itself, though, is a mashup of every Batman movie. The pace is a breakneck speed that hops between moments in films, though varied enough to not be a one-for-one retelling. Cutscenes between chapters hurriedly hint of changes in Gotham and what to expect in upcoming chapters. Unlike the movies though, don’t expect it to go in order. Batman Begins starts the show with a retelling of our hero’s origin, followed by a Penguin car chase à la 2022’s The Batman, and then some inclusion of the Burton films. It works well enough, though the changes to make all the films canon with one another can feel forced. But it still doesn’t keep it from being fun!

The voice acting and soundtrack deserve a nod here, too. Thanks to some of the wonderful music, reliving these scenes again (in LEGO form) is wonderful. While I’m not going to say that Prince’s “Partyman” scene from the ’89 Batman movie was as good here, it certainly didn’t make it worse. Like most Prince inclusions, it only enhanced the experience.

The acting was a harder case, though, especially for one actor. Everyone does a great job conveying their characters, and despite it being referenced from the movies, it wasn’t a dealbreaker having new voices for the characters…. except for The Joker. To give Ewan Bailey credit, he did a great job for an impossible ask. Unlike many of the other characters, I personally find it difficult to replace Jack Nicholson or Heath Ledger in their iconic performances. Even worse for Bailey, he had to do both in the same game and make them essentially the same person, despite their major differences. Had it been a fresh take on the clown prince of crime, I’m sure the comparison wouldn’t apply. But given what this game is, I found it hard to avoid that comparison. And that’s a brutally unfair opinion for Ewan Bailey’s performance, but one I have to be honest about, as well.

One of the better inclusions from Batman’s past comes from the Arkham games: the combat. While it does feel watered down in comparison, the influence is there on its sleeve. A combo meter builds up as you dart between enemies and rough them up and occasionally dodge, flip over, or flat out counter-attack them during each scuffle. This, like the Arkham games, is made more difficult by inclusions of enemies that mix up the combat. The big bruisers will charge at you and don’t take attacks lightly. Some have stun guns that will paralyze you shortly. Shielded enemies will cause you to attack from behind as their front is obviously guarded. Maybe this all sounds familiar if you played the Rocksteady games, and it should. There’s no denying what they were going for here.

But, maybe you want to avoid fights? Like the Arkham titles, stealth and takedowns play a part here too. Sneaking behind an enemy allows for quick takedowns, and the same can be said for hiding on perches that allow you to get the drop on someone or pull them up and hang them out to dry.

These stealth sequences are where I found some of the controls a bit aggravating. Too often I found myself grappling to the wrong location, leading to drawn out moments. Trying to lure enemies away from each other is important because they are usually more bunched together, but this means they tend to go along with each other, too. The Arkham games were good about the crooks splitting up, but here, not so much. This is made more frustrating by things like the batarang. I found myself locked onto an enemy even when I wasn’t looking at them, and when I threw it to distract them with a sonic batarang or to light some barrels on fire, it instead hit the enemy I moved the cursor across, not where it was resting when I hit the button. It’s minute details like this that are so close to feeling good, but they’re off just enough to be irritating.

These fights, and generally some exploration aspects of the open-world Gotham, can be influenced by the skill tree. Each character – who also have their own abilities – can upgrade a number of aspects to their arsenal. Perhaps you want to swing around enemies with the batclaw or gain extra focus (allowing for the special KOs) while traversing Gotham. Some skills work for everyone, and some work for individual characters. So, there’s plenty of upgrading to be done after locating WayneTech chips in the world or acquiring gold bricks at the end of each main mission.

As I noted, each character has their own specialty in this game. In past LEGO games, the cast was huge, and many shared the same abilities. Here, the playable characters are much more limited in scope (which I find a bit of a bummer), but each serve a different purpose. Batgirl has hacking abilities, Jim Gordon can stop fires and plug up leaks, Robin can create tightropes between places, etc. In the open-world, these different abilities will help with the collectathon chase, not to mention special areas of individual levels.

The levels themselves I was pleasantly surprised by. In past games, I often felt the missions were long-winded and took forever to complete. Even if they were checkpointed well during transitions between areas, I often thought they should be shorter. That issue has been solved in LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight. I never found myself being tired of the same mission, which is especially beneficial when replaying them for collectables. This is partly due to the quick run-through of these levels that don’t get bogged down by extensive set pieces and overused puzzles.

Lastly, but certainly not least in a LEGO game, is the humor. I’ve played a lot of LEGO games, and maybe I’m biased because of the character, but I found this to be the funniest LEGO game yet. Both the jokes being told and the hilarious visual cues work so well that I didn’t just chuckle, I full blown laughed out loud. Doesn’t happen often in games, and happened here quite a few times. It’s clever, it’s cute, and most importantly, the comedy works for all ages.

LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is my favorite LEGO game, to date. It shakes up the formula just enough in positive ways – such as the skill trees and uniqueness between character playstyles – to overlook gripes with the game. Yes, a larger cast is always fun and I wish some of the controls were better. Yet, despite my worries of shoehorning the stories together, they did a great job and it wasn’t as disorienting as I feared. LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is a great game in general, despite some hiccups, that all players of any age can enjoy.