Back in 2009, I
did a back-to-back Batman special with one of the games being Batman Arkham
Asylum, one of the best games of 2009. The other was Traveler Tale’s Lego
Batman. While both games were great in their own way, Arkham Asylum was the
better of the two. I mean, Traveler Tales has made some great games using the
Lego license, but a lot of the games in the Lego series have been getting
stale. It doesn’t matter which game you play, they all feel the same. It’s like
the Madden and Call of Duty series, no matter what title you give the game in
the series, it’s basically the same. It gets tiring after awhile. So, what
chance does this recent Traveler Tales game have? Lego Batman 2: DC Super
Heroes for the PS3, 360, 3DS, and PS Vita is today’s review. Offering more
super heroes to play as, and having actual voice acting, how does this game
stack up? Does it bring the Lego series new life or does it just fall short a
couple bricks? Read on to find out.
Troy Baker voices
Bruce Wayne who is going into town for a “man of the year” award with Lex
Luthor, again voiced by Clancy Brown. Of course Bruce wins the award and then
the Joker, voiced by Steve Blum screws up the ceremony, and Bruce turns into
Batman, stops the joker, and sends him to jail. To no one’s surprise, Lex
Luthor helps the Joker and many villains escape into the city. Batman, with the
help of his sidekick Robin and the Justice League must stop Joker, Lex, and
anyone else who gets in the villains’ way to rule the world! The story is
rather simple, but it’s a casual kid’s game, so don’t expect to see the dark
themes from Arkham City appear here. I think one of the first things I had to
adjust to was the fact there was voice acting in this game. At first, it was
weird to hear Steve Blum do the Joker, but it grew on me and he did a good job.
The game play in
Lego Batman 2 has some of the old Lego design, but has some big additions added
to the entire play experience. The world of Gotham City is now open to explore
by foot or vehicle. All over the map, there are areas that you can fast-travel
to after you unlock a vehicle transporter thing. You also get a bonus when you
unlock a vehicle transporter, and a super villain to fight that is near the
area of the transporter. If you beat him or her and the fairly simple fighting
tactics, you can purchase the super villain and use him or her in the open city
to do certain things that you can’t do with the normal super heroes. In the
normal Lego action levels, they are pretty much set up like the ones from Lego
Batman. You have Batman and Robin at the beginning, and in the first half of the game, you get different suits to tackle
different situations, like destroying certain colored blocks and taking care of
hazardous materials. Even the magnet suit comes back and is now not as
pointless as it was in the first game! Since this game does have the subtitle
of DC Super Heroes, you correctly guessed or have seen that you can control
different DC Super Heroes, especially Superman. Each of the heroes has usually
two built-in abilities that would require Batman and Robin to have multiple
suits for. For example, Cyborg, Superman, and Wonder Woman can pull on orange
bricks, Cyborg and Superman can shoot lasers destroying orange bricks, and
Green Lantern can manipulate neon green bricks. There are a lot of different
things you can do with these heroes and it is fun to control them. There is a
split screen co-op mode, but I’ll talk about that later on in the review.
Overall, if you want to get everything including bricks, villains, and you get
the idea, you got about 20 hours or more. I completed my run-through of the
game at 24 hours or so.
The graphics look
great on the HD consoles, I can’t comment on the Wii or handheld versions, but
the console versions are nice to look at with a few texture pop-ins from time
to time. The thing that surprised me was, again, the voice acting. I was a
little thrown off when I saw Troy Baker and Steve Blum take on Batman and The
Joker, but they did a good job. They even got voice actors like Tara Strong,
Travis Willingham, John DiMaggio, Rob Paulsen, and many other actors who bring
the characters to life. The music that is used in the game is the Danny Elfman
Batman soundtrack, John William’s Superman soundtrack, and has some original
songs made for the game. The humor,
while childish, did make me smirk from time to time. There has to be something
said when later on in the game when Superman loses the ability to fly, you as
Superman are driving a garbage truck to the next story-based objective.
So, why is this
game a few bricks short? Well, the Justice League barely does anything
story-wise until the end and has no character development. It’s rather
obnoxious when I have to wait to play Cyborg and Green Lantern until the VERY
END of the game. I also found the boss fights just okay. They weren’t terrible,
but were just average. The boss cameos from mostly Batman villains that are
located all over Gotham are basically poorly implemented and are boring to the
point of being pointless. A lot of them usually have the same tactics and are
VERY easy to beat when you have someone like Wonder Woman or Superman who can’t
get hurt. Oh, and why do I have to buy every villain to unlock them? A lot of
them get stupidly expensive and it will take you forever to unlock EVERYTHING
due to the prices of everything. The final boss fight is also disappointing and
takes way too long to finish. I won’t say how it goes if no one has played it,
but be prepared to get bored. I also found some of the old issues from the last
couple of Lego games, like the pulled back camera and the split screen co-op
are still huge hassles that Traveler Tales NEEDS to fix in the future games.
I’m also not a big fan of the DLC, but you don’t have to buy them if you don’t
want them. I also hate how the map system works, since you have to constantly
pause the game to see the map on a different menu screen and it halts the
gameplay. Oh, and there is no mini-map or hub map. My final complaint is minor, but I found the
vehicle controls, running in the city, and flying controls are a bit loose. It
was awkward to control the characters, and vehicles don’t have that polished
feel to them.
So, is this my
favorite game of the year? No! Is it a bad game? No! Is it a good game? Why,
yes it is! It’s one of the best games out of the Lego franchise and one of the
better games of this year. If you want to get a copy of it, I can recommend
getting the 360 and PS3 version. I just hope Traveler Tales can go up and
beyond the line of duty for the next games in the Lego super hero game.
This
game gets a solid 8 out of 10
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