Batman: A Telltale Series (PlayStation 4) Review

When I sat down to write my review of Batman: A Telltale Series, after 11 hours or so with the game, exploring its narrative and becoming familiar with its characters, I drew a blank. Like a particularly middling episode of a sitcom, it feels like nothing was really accomplished. Nothing was lasting. The villains rose, they fell, and now all is about the same as it was when it started. Perhaps it’s because I’ve played quite a few of the Telltale series now, and now the formula is showing through a little too clearly.

That, combined with the sheer volume of the developer’s outputs – Minecraft: Story Mode, Batman, and two Walking Dead series over the course of just one year has led to a general feeling of malaise. With little gameplay innovation, the games have had to increasingly rely on just the franchise’s individual appeal, and it’s storytelling chops. Unfortunately, Batman falls short on both accounts. A rushed, yet packed story left me cold and did almost nothing new to make use of the Batman licence beyond the bright lights and dark capes of the spectacle.

The five episodes of Batman are set near the beginning of the Dark Knight’s reign. Batman is new and unsure in his place. The police don’t yet trust him, but, he has hardly any serious competition. Harvey Dent (later Twoface) is running for Mayor as the clean candidate. Oswald Cobblepot has just returned from the United Kingdom with plans for revolution, and a third mysterious force is making itself known in Gotham City.

Of course, this all falls apart over the course of each episode and Batman must make amends, repair the ruptures the city has given itself. This is expected. But what was less expected was the amount of time you could spend as Bruce Wayne. There are even times where you can choose to appear as one of your alter egos. The choice usually seemed to come down to talking (Bruce) or action (Batman), but in either there was far too much politicking. Telltale have put in a lot of narrative in each episode, which generally means listening to far too much exposition as characters extemporize about their various predicaments.

Batman has long been known as the city’s greatest detective, and in certain areas you do get to take part in some sleuthing. These parts were a relief from the monologues. In them, you link together bits of evidence to form a story about what happened in a crime scene. While this was better than the standard exploration in other Telltale games, I often found myself knowing what happened far in advance of my ability to actually deal with it in-game and progress the story. Still, they were slightly different and a welcome addition to the stable of things to do in Telltale’s series.

Other gameplay innovations were slight, seeming limited to using two buttons for quick time events. This isn’t good enough. The action sequences were clearly straining the limits of the game engine, and if the studio is going to go further towards including action sequences it needs to replace the movement system wholesale.

Yet apparently there is a new game engine in play, but it has done almost nothing for its animations. Walking and lip-syncing in particular are still woeful, more often than not making the characters look like animatronic toys from a Disneyland ride. Some of the fight scenes on the other hand do look fantastic, but their fluidity is broken up by a prevalence for quick-time events – which give you little time to respond – perhaps meant to put some speed back into the fights.

I had some performance issues with the game on the PC where in some scene transitions it would fail to cut to the next scene properly, leading to some de-synced audio. That said, early impressions of the game were of a fundamentally broken PC version, so it looks like quite a few improvements have been made.

A small thing as well, is that when I finished the game after the last and easily best episode, it almost immediately presented me an advertisement for their telling of Game of Thrones, incidentally one I think that was a particularly poor effort on Telltales part. It’s a cheap, desperate shot at getting you to buy more, and totally unnecessary. Ads for game in other games has always sat uneasily with me, and to show it to me right after an emotional final episode was a little off putting.

So is this series of five episodes bad? Well, not really. But is it good? Again, not really.

It’s exactly the sort of middling effort that smells of a great opportunity passed by, in the same way Ubisoft did so little with the American and French revolutions in Assassin’s Creed III and Unity respectively. This is Batman! To waste one of comic’s great character (And DC’s only solid box office moneymaker) on this boring, politic-ey conversation-fest is a real shame. Telltale can do better, and of them, we can expect more.

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