Batman: The Telltale Series

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

Batman: The Telltale Series is a collection of the five episodes, originally released to multiple platforms in 2016, that comprise the first season of Telltale’s Graphic Adventure series that has players investigating a connected series of crimes in Gotham city, both by picking over crime scenes as Batman, as well as by navigating a delicate political situation as Bruce Wayne.

The story presented here has to be the biggest selling point here. In crafting a story that is as much about Bruce Wayne as it is about Batman, Telltale has created a really interesting take on the Batman mythos that re-imagines both its iconic characters as well as their relationships with each other, and makes the mysteries surrounding Bruce Wayne’s family just as enticing as the crimes they seem to be tied to somehow.

This story is delivered to us in part with some pretty good voice acting (though Troy Baker’s Bruce Wayne sounds more than anything to me like Sterling Archer) and a suitably melodramatic soundtrack. The graphics, on the other hand, definitely feel dated in areas. While the character models and environments certainly have more detail than those in Telltale’s first breakthrough success with this style of game, The Walking Dead, this high level of detail also makes it all the more noticeable when characters clip through the scenery or make an odd face, and there’s a fair amount of aliasing here to go along with that. I wouldn’t go as far as to say this game looks bad, but with these games coming out after the much more impressive-looking Arkham games, let’s just say that there’s nothing impressive here.

As for the gameplay, where The Walking Dead combined ethical dilemmas with a clever system that required coordination and focus, here the choices players are given often seem similar or lead to actions or words that weren’t what the player intended, and the action often feels like plain ol’ boring “Quick Time Events”. During some scenes, you’ll be told to press a specific button, direction, or combination on the controller. Sometimes this makes sense, but at other times it just seems random. Plus, the game is inconsistent about how these moments play out – sometimes time will slow down to give the player a moment to react, and sometimes it won’t, with no rhyme or reason why this happens.

What’s more, many of these QTE bits don’t even seem to affect the action. Did I hit the button in time, did I press the wrong one? It hardly seems to matter when the action sequence seems to just carry on either way regardless – sometimes I know I hit the command on time, and the enemy will punch Batman anyway, and sometimes I know I missed it and Batman will still succeed in what he’s doing anyway. It makes me feel like these button prompts are just something for players to do while watching a predetermined movie play out, and if that’s the case I’d just as soon rather watch the movie without all the dumb button prompts.

Being released towards the end of Telltale’s life, Batman: The Telltale series feels in many ways like the studio exhausting what was once a novel and inspired approach to the genre. When it comes to the gameplay, I can’t help but feel that there just wasn’t the same sort of effort put in here that The Walking Dead got, four years prior. However, the story is compelling enough that this game is still well worth playing, especially for the Bat-fans out there interested to see a different take on their beloved characters.

tl;dr – Batman: The Telltale Series contains all five episodes of the first season of Telltale’s Graphic Adventure that reimagines the beloved superhero and the characters around him, with both Batman and Bruce Wayne finding themselves at the center of an intriguing mystery. It’s a shame that the gameplay here isn’t as inspired as the story, but fans of the genre and especially fans of the franchise will still want to give this game a look.

Grade: B

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