Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight goes against 20 years of Lego game tradition
2026 preview: TT Games is taking a bold step with its limited character roster
It’s not uncommon for a Lego game to cover a lengthy story – Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, for example, spans nine movies’ worth of content.
Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight might be TT Games’ most ambitious offering yet (its comically enormous toys-to-life game Lego Dimensions aside, of course). Rather than encompassing a series of movies, this time players will work their way through Batman’s entire life, in a story pulling elements from the character’s entire 86-year history.
Starting as a young Bruce Wayne going to the cinema with his parents (a ‘block’buster no doubt, given that it’s Lego), the game takes players through every major beat in the character’s story – or at least TT’s version of his story, which it says is an amalgamation of all the common beats found throughout the numerous retellings over the decades – all the way up to his role as the leader of the Bat-Family.
A key example of how the studio is merging together numerous sources is a section I played at Gamescom 2025, in which Batman faces off against Red Hood One at the Ace Chemical Processing Plant.
In the comics, Red Hood One’s real name is Liam Distall, and when his body is found at Ace Chemicals there’s some confusion as to whether he was the Joker and faked his own death, or was replaced by the man who would become the Joker.
In the game, the battle with Red Hood One ends with him falling into a vat of chemicals, in a very similar way to the battle with Jack Napier in the 1989 live-action Batman movie. When you knock Red Hood One into the vat, his mask falls off and he looks suspiciously like Jack Nicholson. He then asks Batman “did you ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight” (a line from the 1989 film) and throws Joker cards at Batman as he falls into the vat. So it’s a bit less ambiguous.
That’s not to say the resulting Joker is the only one in the game, however. It would be impossible to have a single Joker design given how many looks the character has had over the years, so TT promises that as Batman’s story and appearance evolves, so too do other characters like the Joker and the Penguin.
Naturally, this being a Lego game you would usually expect a comically large number of ‘characters’ to unlock throughout. TT Games has already confirmed you’ll be able to play as Robin, Nightwing, Batgirl, Catwoman, Talia al Ghul and Jim Gordon as well as Batman, but unusually it appears to be suggesting these are the only seven characters who are playable.
This is somewhat surprising, given that for the past two decades Lego games have thrived on throwing countless characters at players. Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga had more than 380 to unlock, without even bringing DLC into the equation.
“TT Games has already confirmed you’ll be able to play as Robin, Nightwing, Batgirl, Catwoman, Talia al Ghul and Jim Gordon as well as Batman, but unusually it appears to be suggesting these are the only seven characters who are playable.”
Instead, the studio says players will collect 100 suits, including an array of Batman outfits spanning his 86-year history, as well as alternate outfits for the other six characters.
The other main selling point here is that this is the first Lego Batman game to offer a proper open world environment to explore (rather than a series of stages). Players will be able to freely run, glide, grapple, fly and drive around Gotham City, stopping impromptu crimes they spot on the streets, collecting items and solving puzzles. A variety of Batmobiles from different eras will be available (including the Tumbler, thankfully), along with Batcycles and the Batglider.
TT Games doesn’t often do sprawling open-world Lego games, so in a sense Legacy of the Dark Knight appears to be a bit of a departure from the usual fare. Time will tell whether this is a good move, but from what I played at Gamescom it certainly appears that the tweak to the formula was just what was needed to mix things up a bit. Let’s just see if the apparent choice to only offer a small number of playable characters pays off.
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