SDCC Hands-On With LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham

Earlier today, on the floor of Comic-Con International: San Diego, the upcoming videogame LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham was available to play on the show floor. One of the developers from Traveler's Tales walked us through one of the games' levels.

Picking up from what was teased at the end of LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes, Braniac is the games' primary villain, but players will start off dealing with the Legion of Doom. In the level we played, the Legion had taken control of the Justice League Watchtower, and so it was up to Batman and Robin to launch a spaceship from the Batcave into outer space, where the majority of the game takes place.

While the game starts you off control Batman and his sidekick, it's full of other characters, including other Justice League characters like Wonder Woman, Superman, and Cyborg, as well as more niche characters like the newly announced Batman '66 Batman and Robin, Adam West, The Batman of Zur-En-Arrh, Krypto the Superdog, and Bat-Cow (yes, Bat-Cow). Eventually, once the Watchtower is retaken and Braniac is recognized as the true threat, even characters from the Legion will be playable. Each has special moves and animates in a unique way, so that Solomon Grundy shambles about quite differently than someone as quick as The Flash.

One of the changes made to LEGO Batman 3 from the previous games is that you no longer find new suits for characters to wear as you work your way through a level. As you progress through the game, new suits will be unlocked for the five characters with the ability to switch – Batman, Robin, Cyborg, Lex Luthor, and the Joker. Once unlocked, these suits will be available for players at any time via a radial menu.

The signature gameplay mechanic of building new tools out of LEGO blocks is still an integral part of the game, but now there are certain tools that can only be built by certain characters. In the level we played through, the Flash's super speed was required to construct a device to launch off of the Watchtower from three distant piles of parts.

Once the ship departed the Batcave, we were introduced to an entirely new kind of level. While previous LEGO games have included vehicle levels, the spaceships allowed the game to take on the feel of a sidescrolling shooter. The players is given increasingly more complicated tasks, beginning with simply wiping out Joker teeth, to firing missile power-ups at turrets, before taking on the Joker in a spaceship boss fight. This level really showed what the designers were capable of doing by taking the characters out of Gotham and sending them to the stars.

The game looked good, and was a blast to play. The beat-em-up combat from previous LEGO games was still in effect, and death never slowed things down for long. Each character felt unique, and the game finds ways to force players to switch characters up instead of picking one and running with it for the entire game. And with the huge roster the game is boasting, there's sure to be a few favorites for everybody.

LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham will be available later in 2014 for the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Nintendo 3DS, Wii U, Xbox One, Xbox 360, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and iOS.