Batman Begins
dev. EA Games
Now available for all consoles.
The new Batman Begins movie includes a scene where Batman assaults a group of thugs making a drug shipment. It’s textbook Batman: He creeps around in the shadows, throws a batarang to knock out some lights, and pulls a lone thug into the darkness for a swift beatdown. All the while, the bad guys get more and more scared, jumping at shadows and firing guns at nothing. The more worked up they get, the easier it is for Batman to take them out.
Wouldn’t that be fun for a videogame? Yeah, it sure would be. Too bad the new Batman Begins game blew it.
Fear is meant to be the defining mechanic of the game, the innovation that sets it apart. As Batman you can sneak, you can make surprise attacks on unsuspecting enemies, and you can unsettle thugs by manipulating the environment. Each thug has a heart-rate meter showing how frightened they are, and a general fear meter shows how spooked-out everyone in the area has become thanks to your justice-obsessed skulking. The more frightened the thug, the easier it is to beat them up. Sufficiently scared thugs will drop their guns and become vulnerable to theatrical gadgets such as smoke bombs.
That all sounds great—until you play it. Then you discover that your ability to scare anyone is entirely dependent on scripted interactions. You enter a room with three thugs and the onscreen display points out the big red button you can push to burst some pipes and scare the bad guys. So you dutifully trudge over there, push the button, and then attack. Yawn. You could inexplicably choose to ignore the button and take a harder fight, but it’s not an interesting choice. This reliance on scripted locations emasculates the Dark Knight. If you encounter a lone bad guy without a scripted interaction nearby, you can’t scare him at all. Your gadgets don’t work. All you can do is rush him.
The game is clearly inspired by the Splinter Cell series, but completely dumbed down. In Splinter Cell, you can use your gadgets to observe, distract, or disable the enemy. At any time you can whistle or rap on a wall to lure a lone guard off his rounds and into the shadows, where you can knock him out. You can pick up objects such as cans or bottles and toss them across the room, diverting the enemy’s attention away so you can get the drop on them. At all times, you have the tools and the freedom to make interesting choices.
Batman Begins offers no choices. If you fail to sneak and the thugs come running at you, and then you hit the big red button, a scripted sequence kicks off where the thugs gawk at the bursting pipes and cry out, “What’s that?” “I’m scared!” Then the sequence wraps up and they resume running toward you as if nothing happened. This Splinter Cell Lite is dull and dispiriting. Make a better choice. ■