LEGO Batman - The Videogame

The costume changing pads are the whole design document. Step onto one and Batman swaps into the glide suit, the demolition suit or the sonic suit; Robin gets magnetic boots, an attract suit and a water-breathing rig. Each one unlocks exactly one kind of obstacle, which means a level is really a sequence of locked doors where the key is a change of clothes. It is a neat way to give two fixed characters the variety that the earlier LEGO Star Wars games got from a roster of dozens.

This was also the first of Traveller's Tales' LEGO titles with no screenplay behind it. Rather than retelling a movie, it invents a jailbreak: three villain gangs led by the Joker, the Penguin and Catwoman escape Arkham and scatter across Gotham, and the game gives you fifteen hero chapters to round them up plus fifteen more that flip to the villains' side of the same story. The cutscenes are still pantomime, no dialogue, and the physical comedy holds up better than most voiced tie-ins of the period because it never has to compete with a script.

The loop is familiar and unhurried. Break everything, hoover up studs, find the ten minikits hidden in each stage, then replay in Free Play with unlocked characters to reach the coloured bricks you walked past the first time. Combat is a single attack button and a lock-on, which is generous to younger players and thin for anyone else. The villain campaign fares better mechanically, mostly because powers like Mr. Freeze's ice beam and Bane's brute strength do more interesting things than another wall of grapple points.

The PS2 version is the cut-down one, and it shows. Gotham's hub is smaller and more corridor-like than on the newer consoles, the draw distance is short, and the Batcave and Arkham serve as level-select rooms rather than places worth exploring. Two players can drop in and out at any moment, though the shared camera still shoves you around when partners wander.

What lingers is the tone. TT understood that Batman's grim self-seriousness is funnier than any joke you could write for him, and a plastic Bruce Wayne brooding in a penguin-shaped submarine makes the case better than a punchline would.