Lego Batman 3 is definitely a mark above Lego Batman 2 for me, however it fails to quite reach the heights of the first game. Character designs have improved drastically from the previous games and all the characters look really great here. Unfortunately a lot of abilities are shared between characters, making some characters feel useless compared to others. It felt like a lot of the times there wasn’t much point in a character being there, as a different one shared all the abilities needed for a level.
The level design is also much tighter, with everything packed into a much smaller space, which is nice to see after everything felt a little too spread out in some of the levels in previous games. Some levels are also not as fun to play through, especially during the last section of the game, but I’d say this is more the minority. There is also a nice variety of different settings, something the second game was really lacking.
The story is pretty good; although I’m not really a fan of brainiac as a villain he is used quite well here. The classic Lego games humour is more successful here than in the second, with the different jokes and gags landing much better and more frequently.
The thing that really holds this game back though is that the open world is split is separate planetoids (each of the different lantern characters), some of which have a really awkward sphere mechanic (like the one in Mario Galaxy, but bad). A lot of these planetoids are also quite barren, more empty wasteland than thriving planet. Empty wastelands mixed with awkward planetoid mechanics make exploring the open worlds feel pointless and frustrating. After having the city of Gotham as the previous open world, it would have been much nicer to just have an improved version of that here, perhaps with some other superhero’s home cities mixed in.