You can’t deny that Lego Batman knows its limits. The problem is, its limits are ‘Lego’ and ‘Batman’. That much it can handle with confidence and wit. Everything else quickly becomes a struggle.

The Lego part was always a given, but it’s surprising just how successfully Traveller’s Tales has captured Gotham City. Smoky spires rise into the brooding sky, the streets are a lurid, rain-slicked menace, and the simple story provides a speed-run through the Dark Knight’s signature enemies. Beyond that point, however, the game loses its poise. The series’ punishingly regular release schedule has led to gameplay that is starting to feel stagnant and inbred. Little has been done to improve the flabby level design of Lego Indiana Jones, while the mechanics have mutated from self-conscious quirkiness and into the realms of the genuinely bizarre. The Lego series is hardly losing its charm, but charm alone may now be all it really has.

The puzzles are the biggest problem. Four games of increasingly undisciplined design have brought an unlovably arbitrary nature to many of Lego Batman’s set-pieces. Traveller’s Tales’ model is apparently the piñata, favouring colourful surprises over substance. The solution to a locked door might be locating a key, but it’s more likely to be something entirely unforeseeable, such as coaxing a disco-dancing robot into busting through the wall, or building a switch out of the blocky remains of a flower bed.

It quickly becomes apparent that the only way to proceed with challenges this illogical is to try everything – and with that realization the rewards slip away, and you’re left with something truly mindless. After defeating a roomful of enemies, you’re likely to find yourself tiresomely kung-fuing your way through the furniture and set dressings aswell, hoping the resulting shower of bricks provides the gimmicky means of accessing the next room where the process will repeat itself. Beating up a lamppost doesn’t make you feel like much of a superhero.

Sadly, when the puzzles break down, the platforming isn’t there to come to the rescue. Unlimited lives have long been necessary in this series given the floaty movement, and they’re increasingly becoming a testament to design failure and weak physics. And while a new range of suits giving Batman and Robin different abilities would seem to add a fresh dimension to the levels, they’re largely uninteresting – even the prospect of wings inevitably becomes another variation on lock-and-key gameplay, useful for overcoming the next obstacle, but no fun in its own right.

Despite these faults, such is the strength of the premise that there are moments – mostly when you’re sitting back to take in the amiable characters and artful setting – when you could almost forgive it all. But there are signs that even the developers know the series is starting to look creaky. Twin hero and villain campaigns is generosity of the slightly desperate variety, and regularly plummeting to your death in a game’s hubworld is rarely a sign of design probity.

Too brainless for adults, and increasingly too frustrating and needlessly obtuse for children, Lego Batman makes the simplest mistake any franchise title can: it serves the licence, and nobody else. The presentation may still be rock solid, but this house of bricks has definitely been built on sand.

4/10