Just what's going on here anyway?
Did you love smashing up your brothers' Lego creations when you were a kid? No? Then you had less annoying brothers than I did. Lego Batman, Lego Star Wars and Lego Indiana Jones are all your favourite movies... now playable in Lego.
Is it FUN?!
Oh yes. Things smash up nicely and there are a large number of items to collect - in this case, Joker cards, minikits, red bricks, and lots and lots of Lego studs (used as currency in the game). The red bricks give you access to fun "extras" such as getting two, four, six or eight times as much money. These stack so that by the end of the game you can actually be earning 384 times as much money, which is just insane. Some of the red bricks unlock little minigames. The Joker cards are like baseball cards with Batman characters, vehicles or locations and a bit of info about each one.
The cutscenes are often quite humorously done and good for a giggle or two, and you can, over the course of the game, unlock most of the major Batman characters to play. Each one has special skills and can only use certain types of items and you have to work out how to use these skills together to get from where you are to where you want to go. You get two characters at a time, or eight in Free Play mode, and you can switch between them at will to use their skills as necessary. It's not generally that difficult, and if you really get stuck, try smashing everything. I consider this to be a winning strategy in pretty much all areas of life...
The two-character system means you can easily team up with a friend (a real-life friend, not a Lego guy... unless you're into that... but they tend to have some trouble with controls. It's a lot of jumping for a little guy. Or girl.) Anyway, yes, team up with a friend, each of you takes one character, and you play the game together.
The gameplay can get a bit repetitive, especially fighting. You don't usually have the option for much strategy beyond "hit this guy until he falls apart". I also get sick of doing essentially the same things over and over again to go from point A to point B. It might well take you ten minutes to get both your characters across the screen, and I personally find that gets tedious after I've done it several times.
Is it interesting?
The stories in Lego Indy and Lego Star Wars follow the movies with a few little tweaks to make them more suitable for the Lego game. I'm not sure whether the Batman stories were taken from somewhere or made up for the game, but they seem reasonable. You can play each one twice, once as Batman and Robin and then again, from the other side, as the villains in the story. It's an interesting twist and even though the settings are the same, you have to get around them differently and accomplish different goals, so it's not repetitive. My one quibble with the villains stories is that you don't get to fight Batman and Robin at the end.
Will it make me want to throw my controller across the room... again?
Most of the time your path will be fairly straightforward. It can be frustrating seeking out that last hidden minikit or ending a story with 99% of the studs required to get True Hero (or True Villain). On the whole, though, gameplay is pretty simple... definitely easy enough for this to be a good game for kids or for those new to video games.
Will this game consume my life?
Personally, I found the repetitiveness of this game to be a pretty good safeguard against addiction. There are six stories in total (three hero, three villain) and you can probably finish each one in sixty-ninety minutes at most. After that, the total time you'll spend on this game largely depends on how much time you want to put into running around and getting everything. If you're one of those who MUST HAVE every single item, you will have to play each level at least twice and possibly several times over. This is, however, an improvement over Lego Star Wars, where you had to play each chapter no less than four times in order to unlock all the achievements. And some of those levels included Jar Jar, so folks, this really was an undertaking. Lego Batman is quite short in comparison.
Do I want to spend that much of my life with these people?
Most of your favourite Batman characters are here and you can play as them. They don't necessarily resemble their movie/comic book personas very much, being as they're made of Lego and don't talk, but you can play them and they are cute little guys, for sure!
Is it worth it?
I think Lego Indy was my favourite of the Lego games, but the mechanics of the three games are almost exactly the same and so you can really pick whichever story/character set you like best and then move on to the others if you like the style. You will have to do essentially the same things over and over again and if you're easily bored (or just, like, WAY too cool for kid stuff) then these games may not be for you. If, on the other hand, you're just after a bit of lighthearted fun or, like me, knew you were going to buy this from the second you heard the word "Lego"... then you'll probably enjoy the series quite a bit.
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