LEGO® Batman™: Legacy of the Dark Knight

Let me start by saying I love LEGO games, I have played almost all of them with my wife and it is our go to Co-Op style games. We were super excited for this game leading up to release for including things like a difficulty setting and more robust combat. Unfortunately we are left feeling disappointed with the biggest reason we enjoy these games which is the Co-op. During story missions the Co-Op experience is fine if a little stale for player 1 as player 1 will always be batman outside of 1 or 2 missions in the main campaign. The missions themselves are great featuring fun puzzles, great humor, and a lovely blend of different batman media that comes together as an excellent parody. As a batman game it is excellent overall, as a LEGO game it is seriously lacking. First off there is only 7 playable characters in the game which is a big departure from previous LEGO game experiences which would feature 100s of characters. To balance this out the devs stated they were making each character much deeper and they would have many different skins/costumes to collect providing variety. the costume selections are genuinely great and provide a lot of variety across the different characters but I do not feel they play differently enough to justify only having 7. each character has 2 (mostly) unique gadgets with their own small skill trees corresponding to each gadget, and they are upgraded using Wayne tech chips found in missions and the open world. ultimately that is all that differentiates the different characters and the gadgets themselves have some fun unique combat applications but are mostly used for puzzles. ultimately though each character will fight and utilize traversal the exact same way which makes it hard to justify having so few in comparison to previous LEGO games. My biggest issue with this game comes during open world exploration after the story because for some ridiculous decision player 1 cannot switch off of batman in Co-Op and many of the puzzles and collectibles in the open world require characters other than Batman. Why is player 1 forced to play only batman? It severely hampers one player in Co-Op when it comes to grabbing collectibles and solving puzzles in the open world. Essentially if you like Co-Op in LEGO games only one person is going to have a good time here as player 2 can freely swap between the other 6 characters. Overall this game feels like an innovative step forward for LEGO games that cut many corners and staples of the franchise longtime players have enjoyed. If you are somebody who is only going to play this game in single player then have at it and I am sure you will have a blast enjoying what is probably the best iteration of an open world Gotham in a video game, however if you are like me and play these games in Co-Op with a partner then I would avoid this game entirely until if/when the developers undo the absolutely ludicrous decision to limit player 1's experience to 1 character

Game is amazing 🤩. Try it out for yourself you won’t regret it!!!

Really good no explanation needed