One of my earliest memories comes straight from 1992 when I was five years old. My older brother had just dragged me out of bed to watch some cartoon with him. He vehemently promised that waking up at the crack of dawn would be worth it. Getting up before my parents was pretty much the only way to circumvent the no-violent-television rule that had been ruthlessly imposed on us. So, we quietly sneaked downstairs, made ourselves toaster strudels and sat in front of a 17” tube TV. Then at 7 am we watched a show where a rich play-boy turned crime fighter beat the living hell out of man-bat. There was also a badass rocket car involved. From that day forward I never doubted my brother’s judgment on pretty well everything.

That day also marked the advent of my near psychotic love of the Batman franchise. While my fanaticism for the caped crusader waned during some low points for the series, nothing disappointed me more than the fact that in my time there was never a good Batman game.

Over 16 years I got used to this sad reality and had moved on. This would soon change when word got out that the makers of the fan-service collectathon LEGO Star Wars had turned their sights on Gotham City. The announcement truly shocked me. How could someone combine all the significant loves of my childhood into one product? Needless to say, I preordered this shit right away.

When it finally came out and entered my 360 the opening cinematic complete with Danny Elfman’s familiar theme brought me right back to the first time I saw Tim Burton’s Batman. This made it very clear that Traveller’s Tales had an understanding of the source material and their audience. That is pretty much the game’s real selling point. It is fan-service done with tender, loving care. That alone probably makes it the best Batman video game of my lifetime.

The LEGO game aesthetic and style fits the Batman universe perfectly. There are tonnes of must-have collectables and unlockables that keep you coming back to harvest more studs. The tongue-in-cheek humor provides some much appreciated inside jokes to long-time fans. And most importantly, the game is simple fun that makes you feel like a kid again.

When judged solely as a game, that is where the magic starts to falter. If the sales numbers for LEGO Stars Wars and LEGO Indiana Jones are to be believed, millions of people have already played LEGO Batman. This iteration does bring some improvements in terms of the amount of content and variety of missions with the ability to switch over to the opposite side of crime and play some missions out of Arkham Asylum. However, the only substantive gameplay change is the inclusion of the Batarang, which adds another dimension to your quest to find more studs.

If anything that is the truly defining difference of LEGO Batman. They have added even more goddamn studs to collect. Getting your file to 100% is a serious commitment now. I feel like my Bruce Wayne is more of a destitute than a gazillionaire with the way he voraciously strip-searches the level for more studs. The LEGO series seems committed to making Banjo Kazooie look like a short game of 52-Pick-Up. While you can probably just skip out on collecting all the mini-kits and super hero kits, for those gamers who border on OCD, this is practically predatory.

It is really hard to blame Traveller’s Tales for this though. There is a limit to how far you can stretch their best-selling formula. With this most recent iteration the fundamentals of the series are being tested. In all honesty, LEGO Batman is probably going to be the last LEGO: (Insert Franchise Here) game I will end up buying.

Despite the fact that Traveller’s Tales may have done all they can do with their constructable platform sub-genre series, there are still some shocking omissions from the LEGO series. I am referring to the criminal exclusion of online co-op. These games are practically built around the fun of drop-in drop-out cooperative play. Limiting this to local co-op is simply heartbreaking. My good friend bought this game under the assumption that this would be a core feature of the game. While it doesn’t show off his keenest consumer skills, I can’t say I blame him for the shopping gaff. This is going to be the 4^th LEGO style game that is going to be released on current-gen consoles. How can you make 4 near identical games for a console and not be able to add a feature as commonly used as Live-freaking-co-op?

While my inner Batman fan has been substantially satisfied with this game, I can’t help but feel a little disappointed with this game due to these tragic oversights. This game had the potential to be so much more than a re-skin of their previous titles. They could simply add any online functionality to breathe some semblance of originality to the series. Sadly, I can’t help but feel that this cookie-cutter design trend from Traveller’s Tales isn’t going to end anytime soon.

Once again, the process of deciding whether this game deserves your money is as simple as the other LEGO games. If you are a fan of the franchise receiving the plastic brick treatment, then you probably stopped reading this review the minute you saw Danny Elfman and are presently in line at your local Gamestop. Alternatively, if you are parent trying to subtly influence your child to love the Dark Knight as much as you do, this is probably a great place to start. As for the rest of the human race, I can’t genuinely recommend this game to anyone else; it has relatively limited gameplay with tacked on replayability and absolutely no online functionality. It is sad to say that the block-building series might have run its course, being unable to stand on the laurels of it’s own game mechanics.