Of all the things I've come to expect from the many Lego games I've played over the years, nuanced stealth is not one of them. So when I realized that I was running out of time in my Gamescom demo of Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight because I was spending too long slowly picking off bad guys from the shadows, I was pleasantly surprised to find I'd stumbled upon a very different game to the one I was expecting.
The first and most obvious comparison that Legacy of the Dark Knight drew was towards the Arkham games. Still the best Batman games you can get your hands on, the series' DNA is all over this Lego homage's combat. Stealth takedowns let you dispatch a goon before zipping back up to the relative safety of its surprisingly vertical levels. Hit counters let you chain together huge combos, dodging projectiles or countering incoming hits as you juggle aggro between a crowd of bad guys. It's a more complex approach to fighting that's still relatively new to these Lego games, and while it's obviously lacking the weight that Rocksteady is known for, there's depth far beyond what I was expecting.
