The Ringer-Verse
'Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight' Gameplay Preview | Button Mash
12 May 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is 'Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight' about?
Hey, this is Ben Lindberg of Button Mash Moderate fame, joined by my pal Steve Arkham Allman from the Midnight Boys. Hi, Steve. Hey, Ben. How's it going?
Chapter 2: What was the preview event experience like for the guest?
It's going well. There is a little video game coming out a little later this month. It's called LEGO Batman. Legacy of the Dark Knight. People may have heard of it. We will be covering it on Button Mash when everyone has their hands on it. But you had your grubby little hands on it weeks before the rest of us. You got to attend a preview event. You spent some time with this game.
I'm not jealous at all.
Chapter 3: How does the gameplay compare to previous Lego Batman titles?
And so you are here to report back on your experience. We're going to talk about what you saw and what you played while people watch. some of what you watched and played. So give us a sense of what this preview event was like.
Yes. Warner Brothers invited myself and producer Devin out to a secluded place in Los Angeles to play a little bit of the new Lego Batman Legacy of the Dark Knight video game. And as you see here, it's a kind of delightful rendering of the Batman Arkham games of old. And it's something of a passion project for TT Games that has been long in the works, apparently.
And we've had a pretty extensive playthrough time to talk about it. They let us play the game for about two hours across three different chapters and then a free roaming section across Arkham City. It's a wonderful little experience that I'm sort of excited to dive in with you about today.
Yeah, so this is highly anticipated. Obviously, it comes out May 22nd for pretty much all platforms.
Chapter 4: What are the notable features of the open-world Gotham?
There's a Switch 2 version coming out a little later after the other versions. And it's anticipated because Batman and also because Lego and Lego Batman. You put those two things together. People tend to like them. And this is not the first Lego game. Far from it. This is not the first Lego Batman game. It is the fourth, depending on how you define it. But you mentioned the Arkham comp. Yeah.
And that's a weighty comp to drop on a game because the Arkham games are some of the best regarded video games of all time. Certainly the best regarded superhero games, highly influential combat wise.
Chapter 5: How does the combat system resemble the Arkham series?
And so that raised an eyebrow, obviously made me intrigued. But anytime you're going to say that this is a little bit like Arkham, well... well, that makes sense because it's a Batman game, but maybe it makes a little less sense because it's a Lego game.
And we tend to think of something a little more simplistic and kid-friendly and family-friendly and just not quite as complex as the combat system in Arkham. So what did you see here that seemed to owe a debt to those games?
I mean, it's hard not to try to attempt to fill the massive shoes that Rocksteady is doing and filling. And TT Games has kind of made a very admirable attempt at this amazing combat system that Rocksteady more or less perfected. And I think I would say with the highest of compliments that this isn't exactly a 100% riff on that. This is what I'm affectionately calling baby's first Arkham game.
And it has all of those 10 amounts of... classic Arkham combat that you could have. You have dazzling combos, very directional-based. You can counter. You have all of these big elaborate takedowns and gadgets to implement in its combat. But I think the important thing to note here is that TT Games is actually very philosophically...
both married to and divorced from that gameplay because it's kind of making its own spin on it.
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Chapter 6: What unique elements does this game bring to the Lego franchise?
I can talk about the story in a little bit, but the combat itself and the experience that it wants to cultivate is something kind of entirely new while keeping up with the structure that Rocksteady kind of established. And I think nothing is kind of more... well illustrated in that than in its combat and in its kind of moment-to-moment interactions in its play styles.
It's very evocative of those games, but it also has a lot of that TT Games charm where you're going to find a lot of jokes, you're going to find a lot of sight gags, and all of the takedown animations are very clever and cute and fun. I don't think that there's anything that you can find
default this game for because it is kind of ripped straight out of the pages and the screen of all of your favorite Lego movies and all of the great kind of like Lego properties that you've seen a la the Star Wars saga, the Skywalker saga video games, as well as the TV shows that you'd seen in the Lego Star Wars universe. I think it's it perfectly fits with that brand and that philosophy.
Yeah, you could say when you've played one Lego game, you've played a lot of Lego games, right? There's a template, there's a format, there's a tried and true formula. And I think plenty of people are not tired of playing Lego games like this, but you might worry at a certain point, will this start to seem stale?
Chapter 7: What character dynamics are explored in the gameplay?
Will the humor seem a little less charming, seem like something we've seen before? Does it just become kind of a reskin of games that we've played and liked before? What would you say differentiates this game based on your experience from previous LEGO games, previous LEGO Batman games specifically?
I think the reason that I can differentiate this, even between different LEGO Batman games, is not only are these collect-a-thons of, I think, the most purest sense, like the kind of joy of looking through this entire world, exploring every nook and cranny, trying to see all of these, like, wonderful little Easter eggs and gags and jokes that these loving creators have put into these games.
But it also kind of wants to be every Batman game that you've ever known. It wants to be every Batman movie you've ever known and give you its own unique spin on that tale. To get into the story of this game a little bit, the...
The way that it tries to present everything is kind of taking you from Bruce Wayne being the origin of the League of Shadows and kind of like taking on the mantle of Batman while evoking a lot of the imagery and a lot of the motifs and themes and even lines that you would see in many Batman movies. It evokes Nolan, evokes the Matt Reeves movies, even back to Tim Burton in the 60s Adam West era.
All of these things have kind of come together in a sort of amalgamation that TT Games have lovingly recreated and made its own thing with a dash of humor and unrelenting charm.
And that's one of the appeals of these games, I think, is that it's kind of a postmodern mashup. It's just franchise-spanning, right? It's not an adaptation of any particular arc, any particular movie or comics run.
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Chapter 8: When is the release date and what can players expect?
It's just all of it, you know? You like Batman... Probably the Batman that you like best is represented in here somewhere. So it's sort of like Lego Star Wars, the Skywalker saga, but Batman, except I guess, you know, the organizing principle is maybe not quite as clear as the Skywalker saga, where you have these interlocking, overlapping characters.
trilogy of trilogies, but it is similar in the sense that it spans everything that Batman has encompassed on screen, right? So something for everyone. And I guess you could say, you know, Jack of all trades, master of none, or maybe you're stretched too thin or you're trying to do too much.
But in my experience, at least, and certainly with the Skywalker saga, there really is an inherent pull to just being able to play all of these scenarios with any of these characters and they're all represented. So I assume that that also holds true for this game.
It very much does. I think that you won't find anything not represented in this game in some form or fashion if you are remotely a fan of the world of Batman. I think that the best thing that I can say about this game is that it doesn't want to leave anything out.
And if you are even remotely a fan of anything that Batman has ever been, it will be talked about in some form or fashion in this game. I am kind of stunned at the level of... love and care and attention to detail that TT Games really wants to put into this.
And like, you've seen this in the Skywalker saga and the Lego games of the recent past, but this is kind of taking it to a new level because of the fact that it's kind of this unchapterized, unrelenting, constant experience. I think the biggest gripe that I would have had with, say, the Skywalker saga for the Lego Star Wars games was, was the fact that it has a lot of chapters.
It has a lot of things that kind of disconnect you from the different stories that become the grand opera that is Star Wars. You would have lots of Luke-based missions, and then you'd go to the sequel trilogy, and then you'd go on to Anakin's story, and then all of these... You would bounce across different multiple...
This, you are in Arkham City, you are playing as Batman, and then you are also going along on these missions that are either co-op or drop-in, drop-out with an AI character that are integral to the story that you're telling. And that's kind of the thing that, in a weird way, is grounding this Lego game, in a way. I've really liked the idea that
this is going to be sort of an ever-present experience for the player. It's not going to be a thing where you kind of chapterize, okay, I'm going to play just, you know, the Death Star run mission, or I'm going to play the pod racing zone in episode one of Phantom Menace.
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