I grew up ping-ponging between LEGO Star Wars couch co-op and sneaking through Arkham Asylum’s vents at 2 a.m. with headphones on. So when TT Games said they were merging an open-world Gotham with Arkham-inspired Freeflow combat and classic LEGO puzzling, my brain basically short-circuited with overstimulation. After an hour with a PC demo at gamescom 2025-roughly 35 minutes in a guided story mission, 25 free-roaming Gotham-I walked out with sore thumbs, a grin, and a handful of very specific takeaways. This isn’t just “another LEGO game.” It feels like a proper Batman love letter built out of bricks, with the humor turned up and the friction sanded down for broad appeal.
I played on a PC station with an Xbox pad: I toggled to 1440p, unlocked frame rate, and DLSS Quality. The demo defaulted to a 60 fps cap, which it held without drama. I’m a “stealth first, fists second” Batman player, but I also cannot resist smashing every destructible LEGO crate in sight for studs—old habits. The demo dropped me at dusk in Gotham’s Financial District, rain lacquered on rooftops, neon bleeding across puddles. A TT Games rep set me loose with a story chunk chasing the Penguin through a museum gala, then cut me into free-roam to sample a few side activities and a timed Batmobile run.
What struck me in the first five minutes? The audio-visual rhythm. You get the LEGO clack and snap, yes, but also that low, moody hum of Gotham—sirens wailing somewhere you can’t see, Art Deco signage flickering, gargoyles cutting silhouettes through the fog. The city feels chunkier than previous LEGO sandboxes; the buildings have distinct layers instead of feeling like facades. Gliding from the ACE Chemicals billboard into a neon alley, I saw a random event trigger: a group of thugs mugging a tourist outside a cinema showing a 1989 “Bat Marathon.” It took me 30 seconds to drop in, throw a few boomerang counters, cape-stun a goon, and send purple suits exploding into studs. The tourist left behind a comic cover collectible for my trouble. Ding—dopamine loop engaged.
Combat maps cleanly onto the pad. X to strike, Y to counter, B to dodge-roll, A to jump and glide-kick. Hold Left Bumper for a radial gadget wheel: Batarang, Smoke Pellets, Line Launcher, Explosive Gel. Right Bumper fires the grapnel to zip to highlighted perches. There’s an on-screen combo meter in the top-left; land 8-12 hits without taking damage and you unlock a “Team Takedown” prompt that, in solo, still triggers a slick animation—Batman slings an enemy to the floor as Robin (AI) vaults off his staff, smashing a dual takedown that sends studs showering like fireworks.
How’s the feel compared to Arkham? Lighter, less punishing, more readable. The counter windows are generous; attack telegraphs are color-coded and clear. But there’s nuance: the cape-stun into ground pound still feels like a strategic choice, not just a flashy button. The batarang quick throws are on cooldown to discourage spamming. I liked the “brick-breaker” finisher that, once the meter fills, lets you target a heavy enemy and trigger a mini-cinematic: Bats plants a gadget charge that pops them like a LEGO pinata. It’s crowd-pleasing without killing momentum.
After 20 minutes, I found a rhythm: glide-kick to open, mash a three-hit chain, pivot with a counter, pop smoke, and single out the shielded brute with Explosive Gel. The only snag was the lock-on, which occasionally snapped to a distant goon mid-combo because he was “threat marked.” Twice it yanked me across the screen when I wanted to finish the guy in front of me. It’s fixable with tuning. The camera also dipped low and wide in co-op, which looked cinematic but sometimes hid ground hazards. We died to a trip mine we literally couldn’t see because the split-screen boxed us in.
LEGO games live or die by the click of a good build spot. Here, shimmering piles of bricks invite you to hold B to assemble a contraption, but the toys feel more in-world than ever. In the museum set piece, I rebuilt a toppled dinosaur skeleton as a counterweight to lift a security gate, then swapped to Robin to plug his staff into a wall socket and pole-vault onto a balconied control room. A minute later, Batman needed his Hazmat Suit to cross a toxic spill in the archives. Swapping suits is mapped to the D-pad; each suit sits on a neat carousel with a short tooltip. The Hazmat visor fogging up as you step into green goo? Chef’s kiss. The old LEGO humor is intact, but the routing has a subtle logic that nudges you to read the room, not just hoover studs until a prompt appears.
Co-op is where the puzzles sing. My friend held a pressure plate while I grappled to an upper balcony; she then released the plate to launch me on a timed platform cycle while I disabled laser grids from a terminal. A gag triggered if you try to go solo: a little cutaway where Batman deadpans at the camera as the platform resets under his boots. TT Games still knows how to gently rib you for ignoring the intended solution without making it feel mean. If you’re playing solo, the AI partner is competent enough to hold switches and follow your breadcrumb trail, but I’d still say: if you can, bring someone. The moment-to-moment is built for two.
After the museum chase (more on that in a sec), I spent 25 minutes gliding through Gotham. The map is carved into readable districts: a Financial cluster full of glass and chrome, an Industrial stretch with belching stacks, and an Amusement Mile that’s pure neon carnival. Fast travel is gated behind repairing Bat-Signal outposts—little build puzzles that double as watchtowers. Random events pinged on my HUD: a gang knocking off a jewelry store, a street race challenge that unlocked the ’89-style Batmobile, a hostage rescue that turned into a short stealth encounter atop scaffolded rooftops. Each activity spat out a mix of studs, a gold brick, or a character token. Within 10 minutes, we had unlocked a classic blue-and-gray Batsuit alongside a brooding modern iteration, and swapping them actually tweaks traversal animations—older suit is a touch more theatrical in its cape sweeps.
The vehicle stuff is promising, if not fully polished in the demo. The Batmobile is weighty, punchy, and loud, but the steering had a little foaminess at high speeds that made tight alley pivots feel like wrestling a sofa on rollerblades. The checkpoint race down into the Narrows was still a hoot; tiny visual jokes pepper the route: a Calendar Man poster winking at a date-specific side quest, a Condiment King ad on a hot dog stand, a billboard for “Falcone’s Fine Imports” that gets graffiti’d if you drive the route at night instead of day. Those time-of-day tweaks add texture you might miss if you’re mainlining story beats.
The showcased mission had Batman and Robin crashing a gala at the Gotham Museum while Penguin’s goons lifted artifacts. It’s part brawl, part stealth-lite, part guided set piece. At the 18-minute mark, I hit a room with four patrolling thugs and one mini-boss with a shock umbrella. Detective Mode—tapped on the D-pad—washed the scene in blue outlines, highlighting grapple points, vents, and enemy cones of vision. It’s simplified from Arkham but felt like a genuine layer instead of a token button. I perched on a chandelier, dropped a smoke pellet, and chained two silent takedowns before the heavier guard turned, barking a line about “woodpeckers in the rafters.” Cue chase: the camera swung behind Penguin as he waddled into a hallway stacked with breakable sculptures. We pursued, smashed priceless vases (sorry, insurance adjusters), then Robin peeled off to redirect a closing gate while I line-launched across a gap. The crescendo is a boss arena that’s essentially an interactive diorama—pressure plates trigger wall displays, a dinosaur skull bites when you batarang a target, and Penguin gets ping-ponged around the space like a marble.
The punchline lands as you cuff him: Batman tries to deliver a gravelly one-liner and sneezes because of the museum dust, then stubbornly repeats the line word-for-word with a deeper growl. It’s classic TT Games—a send-up without undercutting the character. I laughed, hard.
This game is shameless in the best way about celebrating Batman’s 80-plus years. In 25 free-roam minutes I clocked nods to at least four eras: a rooftop billboard playing a silent reel of a black-and-white serial, a neon “BAT-DANCE” club poster, a brooding skyline straight out of The Batman’s rain-slicked mood, and a gleaming art deco bank oozing Animated Series energy. Slotting suits isn’t just cosmetic. The Animated-style suit triggers a slightly different idle pose and a more comedic cape flare after a combo. Meanwhile, a bulky armor suit changed my cape-stun to a heavier slam with a longer recovery. Vehicles lean into the same spectrum: the long-finned classic is a drift queen on wide boulevards, while the modern muscle Batmobile grips tighter in alleys but fishtails when you overcorrect.
If you’re the type to freeze-frame a trailer to spot whether a cowl’s chin angle is more Keaton than Bale, this playground is your candy shop. The trick the demo pulls off is embedding this fan-service in things you do—unlock a suit by finishing a themed side mission or by assembling a diorama in the GCPD garage, not by opening a menu and buying it with generic currency. It feels earned, not drip-fed.
On the PC build I played, performance was rock solid at a 60 fps cap in 1440p with DLSS Quality. There’s a toggle for ray-traced reflections—I kept it off due to the show floor chaos, but puddles still reflected neon nicely with screen-space tricks. Settings are clear: resolution scale slider, motion blur toggle (off, thank you), field of view, and separate sliders for character and world detail. Subtitles have scalable sizes and you can set a high-contrast outline around your character, which in co-op saved our bacon when the camera pulled back.
Co-op ran in vertical split-screen for the story mission; free-roam merged our views when we stayed close and split when we diverged, snapping back together if one player hit a door. It mostly worked, but the auto-merge during a fight once dragged my partner off a ledge mid-combo, which prompted some couch grumbling. I didn’t test online co-op in the demo—this station was couch-only—so I can’t speak to netcode or matchmaking. Controller rumble is tasteful; a subtle thrum when the grapnel catches a ledge is the kind of haptic that quietly sells fantasy.
If you’ve been waiting for a Batman game you can play with your kid, your partner, or your lapsed-gamer friend without dumbing the fantasy down to mush, this is squarely in your lane. If Arkham is your north star and you need the risk of failure to sell the power fantasy, you might bounce off the accessibility—though I’d still recommend trying the harder difficulty (it was grayed out in the demo menu, but visible) before you judge. And if you’re a lore goblin like me who gets giddy when a background poster matches a 1970s comic colorway, the density here is borderline irresponsible—in a good way.
At minute 10, I worried this would just be Arkham-lite in a LEGO coat. At minute 30, after the museum gauntlet, I realized it’s proudly a LEGO game first—modular, playful, slapstick—and that leaning into that identity frees it from comparison. By minute 55, gliding over a living Gotham that sparks little activities without shouting at you every two seconds, I stopped benchmarking entirely and started poking at corners like I used to in the old Travelers’ Tales days. That’s a good arc for a one-hour demo.
From what I played, LEGO Batman: The Dark Knight’s Legacy understands the assignment. It captures the tactile glee of smashing and building, the rhythmic satisfaction of counter-focused combat, and the tonal tightrope of honoring a legend while goofing around in his sandbox. It’s not Arkham 2.0, and it doesn’t want to be. It’s the friendlier, funnier cousin who still knows how to throw a punch. I want to see how mission variety holds up over a full campaign, whether the random events stay spicy at hour 20, and if vehicle handling tightens before launch. But if you asked me right now whether this could be the most joyful way to bat around Gotham with someone else on the couch? My answer is a gravelly, slightly LEGO-muffled yes.
Provisional Score: 8.5/10 (Based on a one-hour hands-on demo; subject to change at launch)
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