LEGO Batman 2: The "Bad" Decisions And Thoughts For Improvements

So I have just completed LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes to 100% and unlocked everything (yay for me), and after spending some time, having fun and messing around with things in the game, there are quite a lot of things that bothered me a little... now, before we get started, yes there will be spoilers... and this is only kind of a review... it's not meant to inform you of anything particularly relevant, or influence your decision in any way, these are my (mostly negative) opinions, which I'm putting out there, because I've had similar opinions on some of the previous LEGO games and I kinda want that to change... I will also add that since they are my personal gripes, there are going to be things that are major annoyances and there are going to be some things that are really petty and small...

1) Batman being the focus of the game... sure the first LEGO Batman game was good... it was actually pretty great, but for "them" to make a DC superhero game and then only introduce the other heroes on the last level... I don't like that. There needs to be a balance of characters, not just using Batman, Robin and Superman all the time, because it gets boring after a while. If they intended for it to be a Batman and Superman game then sure, ok, "LEGO DC World's Finest", sounds a bit off... if they're going with other DC heroes, why not call it "LEGO Superheroes: DC Universe" or something similar instead of the focus on Batman.

2) The actual character choices... If you look at the default roster (not including the DLC pre-order bonuses) there are some strange choices in there... by which I mean that when I choose characters, I do it based on partnerships or teams... now the DCU has a few major teams on their roster, but only some of them are used here, so it seems out of place, hopefully this will demonstrate what I mean: there are 15 hero characters, some of them I associate more with certain teams than others, for example, Huntress and Black Canary are members of the Justice League, but I think of them more as a member of the Birds of Prey:

Now, I will grant you that the whole "character war" is one that will go on for eternity, but I honestly do not see the logic in having the Hawks in there, nor do I see the point in having Supergirl, Cyborg, Huntress, Batgirl or Robin... if you consider this more a Justice League game than a Batman one, there's just not enough balance to it, to add to this, there are five DLC characters (Nightwing, Katana, Shazam, Zatanna and Damian Wayne's Robin Costume) which is just silly... Nightwing should be in the game anyway... so should Damian Wayne... Zatanna should be a hidden customize character (with Zatara) and Katana only makes sense if you actually have other (memorable) members of the classic outsiders (Black Lightning and Metamorpho) Captain Marvel (Shazam) I'm a little on the fence about...

Then there's the villains... there are 22 villains in the game... (again I'm not including pre-order bonuses and DLC's) three of them are Superman rogues (Luthor, Zod and Brainiac) and there is also Captain Boomerang and Sinestro in there for some reason... the rest are (I believe) all the villains that appeared in the first game, plus Hush who was a hidden character... and it's only the Batman rogues (plus Luthor) that actually appear as villains in the main story... and even then they get defeated during the first three levels or so. I would have preferred they leave out the majority of Batman villains and actually put in the DLC villains (Bizarro, Black Adam, Captain Cold, Gorilla Grodd and Black Manta)

4) Hardly any character customization... This is probably one of the biggest annoyances to me... DC Comics has one of the biggest arrays of characters and the game has pretty much no customization to it... so much so, that despite having three blond characters, there is no blond hair available when customizing. Granted that if you don't want to give away your locked characters, but I would then suggest that you have a number of stock pieces already available and "costume pieces" that can be unlocked when you unlock a character... so when you buy Supergirl (for example) you also unlock Supergirl's costume pieces and maybe some alternate costume pieces as well, so we can have an alternate version of the character or we can make hidden characters like having Kid Flash or Superboy or (re)creating the Green Lantern Corps... I did make a Zatanna / Zatara character, but it looked very little like them and there was a Vixen "body" but you couldn't get any yellow legs or a flat-top hairstyle...

The problems that I've found when trying to do this are really annoying... you can't change a cape (that I'm aware of) you can only choose certain weapons for specific custom characters and the variety is completely boring... instead of giving you more options, it limits you... which completely defeats the objective.

5) Hardly any extras... In pretty much all of the other games, there has been a hub between levels where you can go and buy things, like characters, upgrades, etc etc, but here, there isn't.. there is an open world, where you have to actively seek for vehicles, citizens in distress and gold bricks so you can then built gates so that you can buy characters... and instead of finding red bricks in the levels, you need to find them all over the giant open world... which is ok because they are on your map... but your map has no legend, so it'll take a while to figure out what it all means.

There is also one bonus level, where you have to collect 1,000,000 studs, but that's it... of all the places that you can go in the DCU, the bonus level is in Gotham City... it is even called "Lego Gotham City" I mean really?!?!

6) Hardly any level variety... There are about 20 missions in total in this game, as opposed to 30 missions in the last game, there is also a lack in vehicle missions, which are pretty much integrated into normal gameplay and even with freeplay, you can't swap vehicles, which kinda diminishes them both... though you can use vehicles in the open world, I don't like the gameplay with them much. In addition to all that, there's also a lack of character variance during missions, you do get to unlock four characters for the final mission (Flash, GL, Wonder Woman and Cyborg) but that's at the end... and you don't even have to use all of them, and while sure, you get some new suits, sure, it's still just Batman, Robin and Superman for the whole game...

And even with the other characters, what they've done with them was pretty bad, with Superman having several abilities and characters like Huntress, and Hawks do pretty much nothing at all... they don't add anything other than being a face... which is bad... I mean they have people from DC over there, they should know what characters can do and then utilize that, in both the missions and in the open world... something that really annoyed me was that they completely changed the flight controls between the in-mission and open world gameplay, making it more difficult (and nearly impossible) to hover or slowly move forward towards an item... which is bad because that's what you're going to be doing for most of this game... looking for things, trying to get enough money to buy things and then when you get all the multipliers (which I got pretty early) you will end up with an endless supply of money and nothing to spend it on... so I hope that there will be some more useful DLC characters and some more levels to actually use them on... levels that are fun and that do not involve Gotham City.

So with that rant over with... over to the main question:

Now I know that LEGO Lord of the Rings is going to be the next Lego game... and I suppose that can be referred to as well, but should "they" make another DC game.. or Marvel game... what would you like to see improve, stay the same or what insights do you have to offer?

You want to know what ticked me off? The Flash was completely worthless. He did nothing that was valuable. Flying was so much faster than his top speed. I mean, if you were only going to give him a faster running speed (than other lego characters), at least make it a super running speed that's faster than flying, and can run up walls and water, you know? Not even tornadoes or phasing. OH i almost forgot, he can assemble black bricks. Which would only need building if said bricks wer destroyed by Lex Luthor (your own playable character). If i wanted the black bricks to not be destroyed, i wouldn't have destroyed them in the first place. That's my rant.

I think they definitely need to fix the controls when using flying characters. It is very confusing having to switch back and forth between two different control styles based on where your character is located. Also, in my opinion, they should have made the flying character in question be able to float in one spot, and have a control to make the character go down, rather than having to wait and let your character descend by itself, which is also annoying if you are trying to stay at a certain altitude. The flying system used in Gotham City is hard to use (at least on PC), because you have to hold spacebar to move forward, and aim with the move keys to point where you want to go, rather than being able to rise, descend, move forward and back, and side to side, which would allow for more precise movements. I understand the reason why they set it up like they did; it makes the transition between moving different directions smoother, but I think it is inefficient and rather annoying.

I also agree that the Flash doesn't seem to do as much as I'd like him to, but then again, neither do most of the characters. Many of the characters lack unique/original animations, and they seem to instead be a mashup of different suits/powers already available (Captain Boomerang, Wonderwoman, Harley Quinn, etc. simply have variations of the batarang). Also, Green Lantern, in my opinion, was a big let down. I thought there would be a lot more power ring action going on, but the only attack you can do with it outside of building a pre-set object, is a ground slam.

I understand this game IS Lego BATMAN 2, and the focus isn't really ON the other characters, but it really would have been nice to see more.

I hated this the most.

I would've just said f^*&% it and made this Lego DC Superheroes or Lego Justice League instead of Lego Batman 2.

also the flash in this game is Barry not Wally.

its a boring game.

the second one was my favorite. The free roam was probably my favorite part about it.

what did you think was boring about it?

It just wasn't exciting. It had boring abilities, all you did was smash stuff, I wanted to play as other heroes but then i realized you had to find things to unlock them and i don't have time for that, its just not my kind of game.

The game never really tells you what you had to do next, when you thought we didn't you ran into a dead end.

yeah. I can understand what you're saying. That was my only complaint with the game.