LEGO Batman: Beyond Gotham Review

Developer: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Price: $3.99
Version Reviewed: 1.0.1
App Reviewed on: iPad Mini Retina

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[Is that villainous supercomputer giving you a hard time? Have a look at our LEGO Batman: Beyond Gotham player guide.]

LEGO Batman: Beyond Gotham is the latest LEGO game to come to iOS, and of course it has a quirky humor and easy to learn play style that mean fun for all ages. This time around, Brainiac (one of Superman’s super-intelligent villains) has decided to shrink the entire earth into a collectible plaything. So Batman, Robin, and a plethora of other Justice League characters join forces with their nemesis to fight the alien threat.

There are 45 missions packed with puzzles and, despite what Batman might say, he needs some help to take down Brainiac. Good thing there are over 100 characters to play with and unlock like Black Canary, Solomon Grundy, Cyborg, and The Joker. Each character comes with different suits that provide them with powers, such as Robin's elite hacker Techno Suit for hacking computers.

Beyond Gotham is mostly a good time despite a few issues. They managed to pack a lot of personality into each character and the cut-scenes often show some amusing moments throughout the story, such as Superman and Wonder Woman’s dinner date being interrupted by a distress call from Justice League headquarters or the Joker cracking wise about Brainiac’s plan to shrink the world.

The unlockable characters are also pretty reasonably priced, but if you're impatient you can buy stud multipliers with in-game currency or even some gold bricks to speed up the process.

There are some issues with Beyond Gotham, though. Playing with the casual controls is an exercise in frustration as they boil everything you want to do into one tap, which means when you're trying to run around and activate powers or tap on objects you can get in your own way. I found the Virtual D-Pad option much easier to play with.

It also doesn't have an in-game guide for the controls. The tutorial will walk you through how to do something once, but if you missed it or forget you're out of luck. it also neglects to explain a few things fully (like hacking terminals), so some experimentation is required. That said, the puzzles aren't very hard so you can breeze through everything pretty quickly once you understand how it works.

LEGO Batman: Beyond Gotham is fun, ridiculous, and includes some amazing voice acting. If you're a fan of the other LEGO titles you should have a blast with this one.