If you’re a publisher and have a hit game on your hands, what do you do? Should you leave it alone, to stand as some sort of one-off classic? Or keep hammering out more and more games based on that formula? In the case of Warner’s LEGO franchise it’s clearly the latter. But for the moment at least, the formula is still working.

What LEGO Batman doesn’t do is stray very far from Traveller’s Tales’ established LEGO formula. Gameplay is a mixture of platforming, simple puzzle solving and combat, all carried out by switchable stars Batman and Robin. Both have unique abilities, giving rise to co-op play. Additional abilities arrive via collectable suits. Batman’s glide suit is ideal for leaping large gaps, while his bomb suit enables him to blow stuff up. Robin can walk up walls with his magnetic suit and don a chemical suit to withstand toxic chemicals. The puzzles are enjoyable, involving building switches, boxes and other objects out of LEGO bricks, then using the dynamic duo to manipulate them to progress to the next section.

If we’re brutally honest, the gameplay is extremely repetitive but the LEGO games aren’t really about delivering cutting-edge platform gaming. They’re about appealing to kids, while giving their geek dads something to enjoy at the same time, and in this respect LEGO Batman is as tightly targeted as Star Wars and Indiana Jones before it.

And there’s plenty of it. Initially the idea is to play though the game’s 15 levels using Batman and Robin, taking on a host of popular villains including boss characters the Riddler, Penguin and Joker. Once you’ve unlocked Arkham Asylum, though, you get to play through a significantly modified version of those levels in which you play the parts of the villains. In addition, great value for money is provided by an enormous amount of replay with a host of unlockables (70 characters, vehicle minikits, mini-games and the like).

It’s an impressive package, and well worth investing in for Batman fans and families alike. For the next LEGO game, though, it’s probably time to rejig the formula a bit.