Batman - The Telltale Series

This telltale game isn't really much of a game, but it does a pretty good attempt to bring what an interactive comic with all bells and whistles would entail. It doesn't quite achieve it, but it leaves you understanding why: The main story has to move forward one way or the other, and covering potentially infinite branches would involve a crazy effort. A lot of things are done with care, the art and atmosphere is fantastic, the story has a healthy amount of detail and balance to make it captivating as its own batman tale, the minigames are short and interesting enough and even if your options are limited, a lot of times they have enough charm: You can try your best to side with a specific character, or you can just stand there and say nothing a lot of the time which is amusing. It's flawed because it wants to be more than an interactive comic book, and at the parts it can, it fails. This is done mostly with quick time events in fights, but those are so forgiving and the bad ends so generic and low stakes, they just end up substracting immersion from the story. The show must continue, but the lack of any sort of branch that deviate from the main path also detracts from the feeling telltale tries to deliver, at best you feel they're just selling dreams. You never escape the feeling that this could be better if it wasn't a game, and that's a problem simpler approaches don't have. It's an important problem, but with these kind of games what matters most is if the story is enjoyable, and in this case, it is. I would happily sacrifice graphics and audio for more words and choices, but that's just me, the potential is there for what could be contained interactive universes. -1 because you never escape that feeling that it should have been better than it is, in terms of having a story that branches out and where your choices matter enough to make you want to replay the game at least another time. It just doesn't happen.

I just bought this game, believing that by the 5th episode all the kinks had been fixed. I was wrong. I have had nothing but crashes and have not had a start of it which has not crashed or hung for minutes. I have a 12GB windows 10, 64bit, Nividia 1080TI with 4GB memory. I assumed that my system could handle this piece of... game...Wrong!!!. The graphics may be great and the music is beautiful, but the programming is the most horrendous I have ever seen (I used to be a SysAdmin in my time). I have tried playing it at 1080x640, cut out the music entirely, and it still crashes or hangs repeatedly. I have yet to get beyond the introduction and have no idea what the story is behind these characters. What a waste of time and money.

STORY: This is a deeply personal and interesting Bruce Wayne story that strikes at the heart of what makes Batman what he is. It's different from any Batman this lifelong fan (and thirty-five year comics reader) has ever seen while still being true to the source material. Highly recommended for story. GAMEPLAY: It's a Telltale game, so you should have an idea of what you're getting just from that. I like the dialogue options, but I wish I had more time to consider what I'd say. The button-press events are less interesting to me, because it really involves more memorization of the controller than actual skill. To be honest, I look forward to the conversations and dread the action. ARTWORK: I love the cel-shaded graphics and I'm very interested by the character designs. It's nice to have a Batmobile that looks like a car instead of a tank. I'm not a huge fan of "Batman wears a bunch of armor," but the costume doesn't look as ridiculous as some Bat-armors have. PERFORMANCE: I played Episode 1 a little late, and it ran perfectly. Episode 2, however, which I played within the first week of release, often slowed down to little more than a slide-show. This happened particularly when Bruce sat in front of the Batcomputer and did his research. I'm talking 1-2 fps and having to guess where my cursor might go with the next flick of my thumbstick. I also experienced some audio static and framerate drops in other scenes, but they weren't game-breakers like the Batcomputer scenes. All in all, I'm looking forward to the next episode, but I hope they get the technical problems ironed-out by then.

... It run with solid 60 fps without any lag or stuttering. This game, on the other hand? Wow. Single digit framerate is the norm. At times it gets so bad, it absolutely screws up your timed events. AND since it is a telltale game, all action bits are timed events. The game is in a very sorry state as it is right now. I have no idea who the are programmers at Telltale, but they need to be replaced (seriously, the last time I met such a broken mess, that game I just could get running and when I did it deleted my saves from ANOTHER game - and that was Walking Dead Season II.)

My only real complaint the linearity is a constant, rarely are you given more choices than 2 that have a large impact, otherwise the story, characters and atmosphere was very good. Rarely had any bugs but as you have probably guessed, the game has been patched since launch.