Following in the footsteps of Traveller's Tales' popular film franchise adaptations of the STAR WARS saga and INDIANA JONES, LEGO BATMAN swoops onto game consoles with one of the most iconic superhero figures in pop culture.  With over seventy years of adventures, Batman seems like a natural next entry in the lineage because audiences young and old can relate to at least one Bat-era.  Ironically this also presents a difficult hurdle for the game to overcome in fan expectation: with so much story and character material to mine, which Batman best represents the mythology for Lego's brickwork?

The answer attempts to please all: a blend of the campy Adam West 1960s TV series' classic costumes and lighthearted tone inhabits the dark, sprawling Gotham City of Tim Burton's feature films with a heavy dose of Danny Elfman's musical score.   Batman (sternly heroic) and Robin (needlessly silly) battle against a Cesar Romero-styled Joker and a 1990s Mr. Freeze — okay, this could work to cover a lot of franchise bases.  Yet the choice leads to a significant problem: with no specific story to follow (see closely observed plots enacted by Lego Jedi and Indy), the game quickly becomes a pseudo-Batman episode in a familiar but ungrounded parallel universe. 

Still, LEGO BATMAN's strengths should be noted and enjoyed: perhaps better than any previous Lego game, this one boasts superb environmental scenes which really put Batman and Robin through their crimefighting paces.  Levels within levels encourage players to investigate every grappling point, cable swing, fire escape, skyscraper ledge, back alley and storefront in Gotham. The thorough artistry and detailed design of the cityscapes make the game a feast for the eyes among all Lego lands.  Note the overall game lighting is subdued and often very dark, so you may want to tweak your monitor display a tad brighter to see every detail — a Dark Knight against perpetual night can sometimes be hard to spot, especially in the deep shadows of the Batcave.  The color palette is suitably restrained to replicate the Burtonesque style of a dingy urban labyrinth minus the depressing decay and squalor from his films, a welcome choice.  Unfortunately most of this detail will go unnoticed to gung-ho players bent on dispatching villains and completing puzzle unlocks.  Lego Gotham are filled with nooks and crannies of aesthetic value, but the in-game action often requires little more from it than typical stud hunting and rail crashing to boost scores.

The game's main drawback arises during solo play when the Dynamic Duo becomes a frustrating deficit in action.  While Batman is swooping across the scene or fighting off swarms of henchmen, the AI-controlled Robin is almost worthless as a partner.  If he's not stuck in an eternal loop against a puddle of spilled Joker toxins, Robin's blindly cozying up to Batman who is setting explosive chargers ready to get blasted into mini-bricks.  When setting such charges, you must literally run away  from the bomb to make Robin follow you to a safe range or he willingly self-destructs.  This programming fault repeats and repeats during game play as Batman must detonate a large number of shiny objects to obtain bonus canisters and complete scenes.  Engaging Monty Python's "run away" tactic every single time Batman fires off a bomb certainly gets annoying and adds a lot of useless running around time to play.  Enlist a crime fighting co-op player and you'll be pleased how much quicker and more efficiently the exact same game levels play — underscoring how solo players are needlessly hobbled by this AI problem.

Some aspects of the game action are rightly challenging, while others just get annoying: ducking Mr. Freeze's ice gun is a skill one must learn quickly (I suggest jumping over him constantly and punching from behind, as he can only freeze in a forward direction and is slow to turn), while even hours of game play make the vehicle and boat levels only slightly easier to master with such hair-trigger controls.  Granted these are meant to be challenging aspects a player must master, but compared to the Snowspeeders on Hoth in LEGO STAR WARS, the Batmobile's steering and acceleration are overly sensitive to say the least — not to mention that these are the least enjoyable levels to play because they're so distant and impersonal by comparison.  A bat's-eye view of cars racing loops around Gotham city streets hardly captures the thrill of being behind the wheel of the legendary Batmobile.  These vehicle levels take the cool factor of being Batman out of the equation and become generic car chasing and task checking, far removed from the characters in play and essentially taking you out of the game's otherwise delightful design.

Batman's prowess as a crimefighter is largely defined by his supervillain opponents, and the game makes good use of each criminal's abilities, if in a mixed bag approach to Bat mythology: Mr. Freeze's icy threat is a natural success, and Catwoman excels at gymnastic feats and fighting skills rivaling Batman himself.  But The Riddler's mind-control powers (lifted directly from 1995's BATMAN FOREVER) rather defeats his penchant for taunting, diabolical puzzles, and The Joker's immunity to toxic goo becomes his primary criminal asset.  Since Lego games limit character voicing to grunts, murmurs and laughs, the game can't help but lack the personality traits which make Gotham's villains so unique and enduring.  Eventually only the appearance, costuming and physical props of the baddies differentiate one from the next since much of their individual personalities cannot be directly expressed in mimed behavior.   Indy can defeat voiceless Nazis without skipping a beat in the action, and who needs to spout dialogue in the midst of a heated lightsaber duel?  But half the fun of the Batman universe is hearing The Joker's maniacal rants or The Riddler issuing a lethal mystery to solve.  A Batman game needs these signature traits to feel like Batman when we play it, and Lego fails to deliver this aspect of fun to the Dark Knight's fans.

It's slightly unfair to bash LEGO BATMAN for some of these shortcomings since the entire game franchise operates exactly the same way, but it's only fair to note that taking on the Batman universe, Lego's game design choices run into problems with this particular license.  The STAR WARS and INDY games fare better by comparison since they follow their films' plots and action set pieces so closely, while expanding these tales with original game level play as needed.  Ultimately LEGO BATMAN suffers from not being specific enough to any one era or story line of the Caped Crusader which makes the in-game action feel familiar but untethered to specifics of Batman mythology.  Sheerly in terms of box office popularity, Warner's latest iteration in the Christian Bale era has become the predominant, modern representation of the Dark Knight, leaving Lego's blend of old school TV series and Tim Burton-inspired Gotham looking a tad outdated in franchise terms.  No doubt fans of THE DARK KNIGHT film's more mature, serious approach will literally get their kicks out of playing BATMAN: ARKHAM ASYLUM if they want gritty realistic combat, and rightly Lego isn't aiming at that market at all.  But taking on Batman's seven decades of pop culture history demands that Lego developers narrow their scope to deliver on details and not simply generic crimefighting behind the cowl.  LEGO BATMAN is far from a failure and offers plenty of enjoyable gameplay to fans of this ongoing series, but Lego has done it better before and likely will again (LEGO HARRY POTTER materializes this year) — in the meantime, go makes the streets of Gotham City safe until a more successful film adaptation swoops onto your console.