Deluxe Edition owners are barely 24 hours into early access, and TT Games already has a #1 hit on its hands. LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight sits atop Steam’s Top Sellers chart with a 96% positive rating across 466 player reviews — two days before its official May 22 launch.

That’s not just good for a LEGO game. That’s competitive with anything on the platform right now.

The Numbers

Of 466 reviews logged on Steam as of May 20, 446 are positive and just 20 are negative. On the critical side, Metacritic scores sit at 83 on PC, 84 on PS5, and 86 on Xbox Series X/S. OpenCritic reports a 100% recommend rate from professional reviewers. For comparison, TT Games’ last major outing — LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga (2022) — landed an 82 Metacritic on PC. Legacy of the Dark Knight is matching or exceeding that mark across every platform.

What’s Working

TT Games didn’t reinvent its formula. It sharpened it.

The fourth installment in the LEGO Batman series lifts the freeflow combat system from Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham games and adapts it with LEGO slapstick. Combos chain into the hundreds, soundtracked by comic-book onomatopoeia — Chudd!, Thudd!, Krakk! IGN described it as “a top-tier Lego game with playful twists on Rocksteady’s Arkham series that hit the mark more often than not.” GamesRadar+ noted that “Arkham flavor combines with Lego comedy better than I expected.”

Seven playable characters — Batman, Jim Gordon, Batgirl, Nightwing, Robin, Catwoman, and Talia al Ghul — share the same core melee but diverge in gadgetry. Nightwing’s electrified gadgets are a standout. Catwoman summons cats with a laser pointer. It’s absurd and it works.

Here’s the bold call: TT Games cut the roster from hundreds of characters down to seven. Each one has a unique skill tree, ultimate ability, and puzzle-solving niche. Batgirl handles hacking. Catwoman cuts glass. Robin pries things open. Depth over breadth, and the 96% rating suggests players bought in.

The story stitches together plotlines from Batman Begins, Knightfall, The Animated Series, and the Arkham games into a single campaign spanning roughly 12 to 16 hours. GamesRadar+ called it shocking “how much it crams in” — though the young-skewing tone means it pulls punches on the darker source material. Matt Berry voices Bane and, per IGN, crank-calls players with “wonderfully childish messages” — the kind of touch that earns the “love letter” label DC president Jim Lee gave the project.

It’s not perfect. Co-op is local only — no online multiplayer in 2026, which stings. There’s occasional jank with AI pathfinding and grappling hooks clipping through geometry. Game Informer flagged stealth as overly simple. These are rough edges on an otherwise polished product, not dealbreakers, but worth noting at $69.99.

The Tech Jump

Legacy of the Dark Knight is TT Games’ first game on Unreal Engine 5, after their proprietary NTT engine struggled during The Skywalker Saga. Strategic director Jonathan Smith credited the switch with enabling “a much more immersive city than we were ever able to do before,” with a scale “bigger than the other titles we’ve made in the past.”

The open-world Gotham reflects that ambition. No minimap clutter — radio towers unlock map sections, and activities appear organically as you explore via grappling hook, gliding, or 30 drivable vehicles. IGN highlighted the Tumbler from The Dark Knight as a particular standout. After a 12-to-16 hour main story, 53% of collectibles remain; 100% completion pushes toward 34 hours.

The Silent Challenger at #3

IO Interactive’s 007 First Light reportedly sits at #3 on Steam’s Top Sellers — a week before its expected late-May launch, with no player reviews published yet. It’s selling on pedigree: the Hitman studio building a James Bond origin story. Players are pre-ordering sight-unseen.

Two licensed megabrands. LEGO Batman retails at $69.99. One has 466 glowing reviews. The other has a blank scoreboard. The coming week is a genuine heavyweight bout between two of gaming’s biggest entertainment properties, and TT Games has already landed the first punch.

What This Means

LEGO games have been quietly reliable for two decades. What Legacy of the Dark Knight suggests is that the ceiling might be higher than “reliable.” By investing in Unreal Engine 5, borrowing liberally from the Arkham combat playbook, and curating a roster with real mechanical depth instead of padding the character count, TT Games is making a clear statement: licensed LEGO titles can stand toe-to-toe with any action-adventure on the market — not just exist as competent family fare.

Sometimes the best move isn’t reinventing the wheel. It’s building a better Batmobile.

Sources