Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes is a Lego-themed action-adventure video game developed by Traveller’s Tales and released for pretty much every system available. The game is a standalone sequel to Lego Batman: The Videogame and the second Lego Batman video game. Numerous DC characters are playable and it also an open world to explore, the first in the Traveller’s Tales’s Lego series to do so.

Pros:

It is an action-adventure game, littered with some pretty basic puzzle solving in each level and a touch of the open world experience in between. This game is chalk full of completionist goodies, various power suits, mountains of characters and vehicles that can be unlocked, etc. etc. You can even revisit old “levels” with your new stuff to unlock previously unreachable things. On my first run through I beat the game with only unlocking about 20% of the collectables. You can pretty much destroy everything and you’re encouraged to do so. If you destroy enough stuff you get a “superhero” rating, which I always felt was a bit weird, but then again this game is full of corny jokes and tongue in cheek humour. The levels and puzzles are pretty straight forward, but can, from time to time, get a bit dynamic. You can fight with robots in this game, fight an even bigger robot as it’s flying and later as it falls down collapsing building. The soundtrack is packed to the brim with authentic John Williams scores which is probably one of my favourite parts, but my favourite part of this game though is the fact that it expands into the whole DC universe with several appearances of other superheroes & villains.

Cons:

As awesome as all those things are, this game has got some serious issues. They build this amazingly awesome lego environment, but only with smaller objects. The building and trees don’t look like they are made out of lego at all. brick, concrete, trees, grass all exist in this “lego” universe, It does seem to be almost consistent with helping the gamer to distinguish what you can interact with, but that’s not always the case, it just feels like an obvious short cut. The puzzles that you have to compleat in EVERY level, feel pretty shallow and there has only been a handful of moments where I got a “that was creative” type moment. I more regularly found myself getting stuck because I didn’t notice a small thing I needed to get to progress, which actually only added to my frustration when I finally figured it out. The camera is fixed so sometimes it’s really hard to distinguish various items and parts of the level. When you have several people on your team it can get really visually messy too, but they don’t do anything but follow you around and stand there when you aren’t using them. The absolute worst part of this game though is the damn button assigning, I mean it is really terribly done, you have 4 shoulder buttons that do the same switching between characters action (something you could have done with one button), yet you have to wrestle with the circle and square buttons that do multiple actions based on what situation you find yourself in. So you can either punch or user your power suits ability OR build legos, but only if you are close enough to the Legos that need to be built, etc. etc. etc. What compounds this is the fact that each superhero, and super suit, has its own thing it does that you need to learn and get used to and remember in what situations it works and doesn’t work. The game does a good job of training you incrementally, but man it because of a clusterfuck real quick.