“We wish to preserve that Lego concept of ‘enjoyable’ trendy, related, and updated, and not get caught in the previous”, says Jonathan Smith, Head of Growth Group at TT Video games.
It’s a difficult steadiness. For nicely over a decade, Lego video games had been the definition of consistency. You all the time knew what you had been going to get: a collection of puzzle and action-filled ranges navigated by a large roster of multiskilled licensed characters. However Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight seems set to distance itself from that formulation, at the least barely. This is a brand new chapter in TT Video games’ historical past, one which blends a reverence for all issues Batman — together with, notably, Rocksteady’s Arkham video games — with a deeper gameplay expertise that was first experimented with by 2022’s Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga.
“With Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, we made a pair of actually vital adjustments that followers actually appreciated”, Smith states. “Particularly, getting nearer to the character, having a extremely immersive digital camera system, and then simply beginning to make the fight expertise or some of the core gameplay methods deeper and richer than they’d been earlier than”.
“We do not wish to lose the accessibility and immediacy, however that confirmed that we may add layers to that and make environments that had been actually huge and broad and actually deep and wealthy and rewarding,” Smith explains. “We have simply gone additional with Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, and then additionally discovered points of the Batman character and the Batman story, and in Gotham Metropolis, which have actually labored nicely with that aspiration to get deeper. To be much more genuine in our therapy of Lego, in our therapy of the story, in our therapy of the characters.”
Characters, and specifically, the quantity of playable ones, have been an enormous speaking level ever since this Lego Batman’s reveal. Followers of the collection had change into accustomed to rosters stretching into the a whole bunch in earlier Marvel, DC, Star Wars, and Harry Potter Lego initiatives, however in Legacy of the Dark Knight, that quantity has been stripped down to only seven.
It’s all in service of depth, says Smith. “We’re taking these particular person characters on a journey,” he explains. “So you might be always upgrading and creating new abilities and opening up new talents for every of these characters. Inside the Bat household, as nicely, we actually needed to give attention to making these characters actually distinctive, making their personalities come throughout and their talents very distinct.”
One of these characters is Catwoman, who we obtained a model new take a look at in motion as half of IGN Fan Fest. TT Video games is aiming to current the “important model” of every Bat hero and villain, so naturally, Batman’s feline foe/good friend channels all eras of her display screen depictions, starting from Julie Newmar’s ‘60s TV present thief to Zoe Kravitz’s trendy revenge seeker. Throughout the recreation, we’ll see glimpses of all of her incarnations, simply as we’ll see her skillset develop past what we’ve seen in the movies as the story progresses.
Instruments at Catwoman’s disposal embody a whip that may not solely harm enemies, however assist in fixing puzzles due to its flexibility (simply don’t ask me how Lego plastic might be fairly that flexible, I’m not a supplies scientist). She’s additionally armed with a really useful laser pointer that may shortly summon a sharp-clawed kitten to scratch a Joker goon’s face to ribbons, or will let you straight management a tamer four-legged good friend to distract guards with a meow or crawl by way of vents to assist unblock paths. In fact, she’s additionally extremely skilled in hand-to-hand fight, which stays largely constant throughout every of the playable characters and is rooted in a punch, dodge, and parry system that TT Video games isn’t afraid to say is influenced by Rocksteady.
“To make an important, actually cool Batman fight expertise, of course, we honor, and we glance to, and we draw upon the definitive work that Rocksteady did to convey that character to life,” explains Smith. “We would like a extremely fluid combo-based fight system. We would like very dynamic encounters.”
That doesn’t imply that Legacy of the Dark Knight is absolutely pushing into motion recreation territory, although. This is nonetheless a recreation that needs to cater to all ages and audiences, so many of these old-school, adventure-focused Lego recreation staples are nonetheless to be discovered.
“The story is extra targeted on a tighter roster of characters that are actually extra differentiated with a lot deeper gameplay,” confirms Smith. “In order that they work nicely in partnership with one another, and we then wish to provide you with tons and tons of choices to see the full vary of what these characters might be by supplying you with greater than 100 completely different fits to gather. So you continue to get that second in the Bat Cave the place you’ve got obtained all the completely different fits from all the completely different characters arrayed in entrance of you, colourful and superb. You are still compelled to wish to full that assortment.”
Making an attempt to enchantment to everybody’s needs is typically a dangerous technique. Introducing an additional layer of complexity to fight, in addition to character development throughout a much-shrunk roster of heroes, may enchantment to these searching for extra of an action-heavy, “conventional” Batman recreation that the absence of an Arkham recreation has left a void for, however may danger alienating those that beloved the joyful nature of the Lego video games that TT constructed its fame on. That’s not one thing that Smith is fearful about, although.
“On the opposite, what we discover with all our Lego video games is that the extra we will draw upon completely different points of a personality, the wider we will make our gameplay, the extra interesting it is to us as gamers, and to youthful gamers and older gamers,” he solutions. “There’s one thing about Lego that simply interprets nicely for everyone. So the extra we will put into that, we do not discover that it misses the mark for anybody in any respect. It simply brings extra to the occasion.”
The Bat occasion will really get began when Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight arrives on PS5, Xbox Sequence X/S, and PC on Could 29, 2026, with it coming to Nintendo Swap 2 at a later date.
Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can primarily be discovered skulking round open world video games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Observe him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.