LEGO Batman: The Videogame | Nintendo DS

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LEGO Batman: The Videogame on Nintendo DS turns Gotham City's struggle with its most recognizable criminals into a brick-built action adventure. Batman and Robin work together to stop villains including the Joker, Penguin, Two-Face, and Mr. Freeze, while a separate villain side lets you experience the troublemakers' part of the story. The setting draws on Batman's comic-book world, with the drama filtered through LEGO characters, breakable scenery, and exaggerated gadgets. You move through levels, fight enemies, solve ability-based obstacles, and collect studs to unlock more of the cast. Playing a hero or villain changes which tools you bring to a familiar Gotham problem.

The Batcave acts as the heroes' starting hub, organizing their campaign into chapters and levels. Between stages, comic-style still frames explain what is happening and introduce the next confrontation. Within a level, a pair of characters forms your immediate team, and you can switch control between them. That switch is fundamental to progression. One member might reach a high ledge while the other supplies the skill needed to clear the route ahead. Getting past an obstacle therefore often means looking at the characters you have, identifying the relevant ability, and bringing the right teammate to the right place.

Moment-to-moment play mixes combat, jumping, building, and environmental puzzles. Smashing objects and defeating enemies produces LEGO studs, which serve as currency for unlockable content. The breakable scenery encourages you to investigate a room as well as cross it. A path that seems finished may still contain something useful to collect or a construction opportunity to examine. Fighting clears space for the team, while puzzle solving decides how the team advances. The game continually brings those activities back together, so a typical stage is a sequence of short encounters and practical problems rather than one extended battle.

Special outfits give Batman and Robin additional ways to interact with the world. Batman's demolition suit, for example, provides explosives for obstacles that ordinary attacks cannot resolve. More broadly, the suits make the heroes' equipment part of the puzzle language. You learn to recognize what kind of challenge a room presents and which outfit could answer it. Villains also have their own useful traits: Mr. Freeze can move through freezing gas, opening routes that would be unsafe for another character. These differences make the expanding roster useful for exploration, not simply a collection of alternative faces.

The villain campaign has its own hub in Arkham Asylum and presents events from the criminals' perspective. Its stages revisit the campaign's locations with different story circumstances, object arrangements, and enemies. Switching sides gives you a reason to learn a different set of abilities while keeping the LEGO format familiar. It also changes the tone of the objectives, letting the same comic world support both stopping mischief and carrying it out. The dual campaigns add context to Gotham's conflicts without requiring the player to follow a particular Batman film. The game builds its own sequence of adventures around the recognizable cast.

Vehicle stages provide another change of pace. Batman's Batmobile and other themed transports are used for sections involving obstacles and enemy vehicles, while hidden items and areas still reward attention. The vehicle portions fit the same broader pattern as the character stages: move through the space, deal with threats, and keep an eye out for something you can collect or reach. Building LEGO vehicles and using special gadgets also reinforces the toy-like quality of the setting. Gotham is full of working mechanisms and constructions that the characters can put together or manipulate, making its scenery part of the adventure.

On a first story visit, the level determines which characters you use. Completing it opens Free Play, where your unlocked characters can return to investigate routes and secrets that the original team could not reach. This makes the roster and the levels support each other: studs help you purchase characters, and those characters help you explore more thoroughly. A previously blocked passage becomes a reason to revisit the stage once you have an appropriate skill. The DS adaptation also includes a Villain Hunt minigame and additional character abilities, giving its unlock-and-explore structure features suited to the handheld release.

Solo play uses character switching to handle the pair's jobs, while two-player cooperative play uses the DS local wireless connection. Each player needs a compatible handheld and a game cartridge for the wireless Multi-Card mode. Working together makes the level's division of tasks more immediate: both people can contribute to combat and puzzle solving as the team advances. The game also uses touch-screen interaction as part of its DS interface. These are features of the handheld version, whose campaign and local cooperation are organized around the portable hardware. No internet service is needed for the local wireless session.

LEGO figures and comic-style storytelling keep the presentation playful, even when the characters are dealing with Gotham's criminals. The North American DS release is rated Everyone 10+ with Mild Cartoon Violence by the ESRB. Its progression is especially suited to a player who enjoys looking for missing collectibles, experimenting with character abilities, and returning to a stage with a better-equipped team. For a quick session, you can concentrate on clearing the next level; for a longer visit, Free Play and the expanding roster encourage a more methodical search. The distinctive combination is familiar Batman personalities made useful through LEGO's building, breaking, and ability-based exploration.