LEGO Batman: The Videogame (DS)

Who is Bruce Wayne behind that hard, plastic exterior?
9/29/2008 5:56 PM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 3

It's in our genetic makeup to want to build things. Clicking colored plastic pieces together not only lets a kid construct some tangible plaything, be it the house he wants to live in, the car he wants to own, or the hero he wants to be. It's about play, but it's about dreaming the so-called American dream, too, and not just yelling "USA! USA!" like a lunatic. LEGO lets you proudly shout, "I made this!" as if it were art and life that you are constructing. That's what the LEGO Batman event at the New York Museum of Natural History was about the other day: kids running around with LEGO and Batman, proudly making something.

What do you get when you put LEGO and Batman together? Can LEGO Batman: The Videogame be deep, even though it's an E10+ rated game with only "Cartoon Violence"? As in LEGO Star Wars and LEGO Indiana Jones, important things have been excluded. The intimacy of the written word, so essential to comics, is gone from LEGO Batman; there's no narration in blurbs. The characters don't talk in words at all (they grunt and make comic book sounds like "oof," "bam" and "riiing"), so one essential movie-like quality is gone.

The enemy and friendly artificial intelligence aren't so hot, sometimes not even as smart as lower mammals like rats. Even Batman once didn't have the smarts to climb from a wire to the ledge of a building when I was controlling Robin. (And they promised at the Game Developers Conference that this AI stuff would be completely fixed!)

While the DS version is fairly intuitive, and it is great that you're immediately put into gameplay -- after the opening cut scene passes as quickly as a flick of the Batarang, you can go directly to Chapter 1 or to Wayne Manor -- there is no indication that you must play Chapter 1 to get a tutorial that tells you what to do. When you do get hints, they come and go so quickly that you feel like you need to be a speed reader. And once they disappear, you can't get the hints back again.

It won't come as a surprise that the graphics in the DS version aren't of console quality, but I did think they would spruce up the backgrounds as they did in the consoles. Sadly, they really have not. When you're battling minor villains, the camera thankfully pulls out for a long shot, but what you see are tiny sprites in battle and backgrounds that aren't detailed enough. And when Batman runs into a wall, about a quarter of his face passes through that wall -- a total coding error.

The substitutions for cut scenes are pretty intense in an old-school way, however. The larger portion of the story is told through comic book panels without words. But after a boss battle, I did wish I could see, say, Clayface die in a brief animation after all the work I did to drown him.

You progress through these comic book panels by using the touch-screen. It's unfortunate that the touch-screen is used for such meager tasks -- since most of the gameplay is done via buttons and movement is accomplished with the d-pad, the use of the touch-screen seems like an afterthought. Alas, the touch-screen isn't used much for navigation or grappling; it's used to set off bombs and other weapons. You can't look around your environment: You might shoot the Batarang at something outside of your field of view, and hear it making damage, but you might not see the damage. There are occasional camera issues, too. Early on, a girder completely blocked my view of the Caped Crusader. (Thankfully, there was no ensuing battle, so I didn't lose a life.) When Robin is at a tightrope, it's difficult to line him up correctly so he doesn't fall off. It's just a tightrope, guys. Don't make it a superheroic effort to get on the damn tightrope. This isn't a Philippe Petit game, right?