Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham is the latest title created by Tt Games and Warner Brothers to be released on November 11th for just about every platform you can think of. I was personally looking forward to the game for a number of reasons, mostly on the promise of their being more characters from the Green Lantern mythos. Does the new title do anything to improve on what came before, or is it just more of the same?

The gameplay is like every Lego game, you will be going through sixteen story levels collecting as many studs as you can along with any minikits you can find. After beating the story, you can replay the story levels within Freeplay mode, allowing to play through the same story as any character you’ve unlocked so you can obtain any unlockables that were previously impossible to obtain. And once you’re finished with that, you have the Batcave, Watchtower, and every Lantern world of their respective emotion left to explore to unlock more gold bricks and characters within races, shooting galleries, and missions. The game seems to pay more homage to the Green Lantern mythos than to Batman itself, despite the title being based around it as you unlock more lanterns of every emotion in the spectrum. A great complaint I have for this game is the sad fact that there is still no online capability for co-op. If you have a friend that the game for the same system, you can not invite them to join you to enjoy the experience together. If you own a Playstation 4 and also have a friend that owns one as well and want to try using the new Share Play feature, that doesn’t even work as the game refuses anything to do with online capabilities. It’s just confusing as there have been so many Lego games and still not a single one has included any form of online play. You can purchase coins, powerleveling and boost services for Amazon’s MMO – New World from Gold4Vanilla https://gold4vanilla.com/new-world/.

Most characters will have multiple suits to fit varying purposes throughout the game to solve puzzles. This ranges anywhere from melting gold pieces, blowing up silver blocks, hitting targets, taking away and giving electricity to special places, and much more. The puzzles are plentiful but easy to solve since the game gives you the tools to solve it quickly as long as you pay attention to your surroundings. Whenever you’re stuck, your best bet to get back on track is just destroy everything around you to build something to help you along. The red bricks you unlock will of course point you in the right direction of where any unlockables are except for two occasions that I’ve found. Two occasions point you in completely wrong areas as one minikit is on the complete opposite end of a level, and the other points in the main area of the Batcave, but is actually in the character customization area. Besides these two instances, it might point you in the right direction, but it’s still up to you as the player to figure out how to obtain the items. I only experienced one crash with the Playstation 4, but I think it was only because the patch had just finished downloading. Other than this one incident, the entire game had smooth framerates throughout with no noticeable lag.

The graphics for this title is amazingly beautiful to look at. Everything on screen is detailed whether it’s the background or the characters themselves. Every level and hubworld is filled with color whether you’re exploring the Watchtower, the Batcave, or the many worlds within space. The soundtrack itself is memorable and pleasantly surprising as anything that plays will hit you with wave after wave of nostalgia. I was stunned when I started flying around as Wonder Woman and the theme song to the old television show began playing and I burst out laughing out of amazement. The voice acting is great for everyone except ironically enough, Batman himself. As used to Batman’s brooding and angry mood as I am, I felt the character sounding more bored than anything. The feeling became stronger as everyone else’s voice acting gave so much more emotion to compare it to.

The story is a fun time to experience as it begins with the differing members of every lantern corp of their respective emotion fighting amongst themselves. Then Brainiac appears and captures all of them as a plan to condense their power within a crystal to shrink entire planets for his collection. By chance, Batman observes Braniac’s ship traveling closer to Earth and is caught by a hypnosis ray and begins destroying the Batcave. Robin is able to snap Batman out of his confused state and now it’s up to them to call upon the Justice League to solve the problem by traveling through space to stop the new threat. Although I enjoyed the story and the many jokes it brought, I feel like the series have becomes less about Batman himself and became more of a Lego Justice League, or even closer to call it a Lego Green Lantern game as the lanterns themselves play a pivotal role in the story itself. It just seems the developers created the story aspect first and tacked on Batman afterwards and find a way to have him lead the story along.

The trophies like any Lego game, are incredibly easy to unlock as long as you have the time to do so. You’ll do the usual collecting of studs, characters, minikits, red bricks, and gold bricks so you can reach one hundred percent. Of course getting the red bricks makes any collectible that much easier to find with the stud multipliers to make character and vehicle purchases quicker to obtain. The rest of the trophies will be simple as it’ll just have you change the two players to certain characters, finishing a race as a certain character, to witnessing the stud fountain that will appear once you do reach one hundred percent. It took me four days with twelve hour sessions to complete this title as quickly as I possibly could and I enjoyed every minute of it. If you take your time with it to do everything, you will still have fun chipping away at the percentages as you unlock more and more so I would easily recommend going for every trophy or achievement.

Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham is a standard Lego title where you’re playing through the story, solving puzzles, and breaking everything in sight to gain more studs to purchase all of the unlockables. But this is not a bad thing by any means as you will still have an awesome time playing through the game as your favorite characters. The music will also offer some laughs and some great nostalgia as it references many things once thought long forgotten and the game looks beautiful throughout every world and level. If you enjoy DC, Lego games in general, or just like having a great time playing a game, there is no reason for you to not own this title at all.

Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham earns a 8.5/10

NOTE: Grades are subjective to the reviewer and readers should draw their own conclusions based on the content of the review, not the final grade.

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