I’ve got three kids and, being an avid gamer myself (when I can scrape the minutes together) they are all, of course, gamers themselves.  My oldest (now 7) finished Halo2 at the age of 4 (yes, on EASY, he was 4 at the time).  My middle child prefers transactional games, any game where points can be collected to attain new and nifty stuff is fair game.  Interestingly enough, the Lego games allow for this as well, so as you can imagine, my 360 pretty much runs 24/7 around here.

So Lego Batman.  Of the run of Lego Licenses (Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Batman) so far, I think this title is probably the best.  Mainly because, compared to the others, it is not tied to any specific film, but rather to “Batman” as a whole.  We have a cast of classic villains (Yes, the Mad Hatter IS a Batman villain) which greatly reduces the frustration the kids feel when a “boss” escapes repeatedly (although this was used to great effect in Lego: StarWars 1, with the constant persuit of Jango Fett, it wore thin with younger kids after a while).  The puzzles are engaging, but not so tough they can’t be figured out given enough trial and error and the Lego styling makes a reasonably challenging game much more accessible to the 12 and under set.  In fact, kids who are not normally gamers seem to find it worth dying over and over to accomplish the goals (and some seem to simply leap their character off a cliff repeatedly just to watch the pips explode in all directions).

As an entertaining game for kids of all ages, and certainly something more family-friendly than the recent Batman film (which I *loved* but I think I want to wait a couple years before exposing my 7 yr old to *that* iteration of the Joker).  All in all I’d give this a 5 out of 5.