One of the first things you have to ask with a film-to-video game adaptation is: How well does it adapt said film? It could either go well like it does with the Star Wars Episode III, the Harry Potter games, and even most of the Lego games, or it could be something like Amazing Spider-Man 2 or even worse, Rambo: The Video Game. This game is the latter.

For one, the game uses footage from the movie, but doesn't use it effectively. Instead of letting them play out, it just uses bits and spurts while having Christian Bale monologue over them, almost like he's trying to give a synopsis of the events of the film itself. It also ignores or doesn't address certain key elements. These include: Bruce's fear training, Rachel and Gordon's introduction, how Bruce came to fear bats, and ect. I will give it to the game for how accurate the character models look to their real life counterparts; the game as a whole looks great and they managed to get most of the actors (except Gary Oldman) to be in the game and they do a pretty good job. The same can be said about the extras.

On paper, there's a lot of interesting aspects of the gameplay. One could even argue that this game could be credited to be ahead of its time and may have even inspired Rocksteady for their Batman Arkham series since this game is meant to be a stealth, beat-em up that has you use stealth against armed thugs. Unfortunately, the execution of these mechanics are an entire different story.

The combat is very basic and clunky since all you do is kick, punch, do some special attack, and then maybe do a finisher. The camera also doesn't zoom out to show all the enemies instead it locks on to one enemy, which means you can't see when an enemy is about to hit you. There's also no enemy variety, meaning you fight virtually the same enemy all the time.

The stealth is where it introduces two fear mechanics. "Area Fear" and the Reputation meter. The Fear meter is supposed to indicate how scared enemies are in the general area, which also determines how weak they are. I think the weirdest thing about this is when a terrified enemy will see Batman as a humanoid bat creature, which doesn't make sense since this form of Batman is only seen by Scarecrow when Batman doses him with his own toxin in the movie.

The Reputation meter is supposed to infer how scared enemies are of you, the more scares you pull, and things like it, but it's pointless since it's all scripted. In fact, it works more as a progression meter since the closer it is to being full, the closer you are to the end of the level.

The stealth can barely be called stealth. Nearly every stealth section is scripted as you have to either wait for a guard to turn around to do a takedown or throw a batarang to knock something over to scare enemies. The reason you scare enemies isn't just to fight them. It's because of the fact that you can't fight armed thugs period so you have to scare them and when you do they drop their weapons and the weapons disappear. The fact that these guys drop their weapons when a crate drops directly in front of them is laughable and just stupid.

The game also seemingly steals mechanics from Splinter Cell, as you can climb pipes, lock pick, use gadgets to hack devices like cameras, and you even have an optic cable.

Everything I mentioned above is quite literally, all you do throughout the entire game. You fight people, move to the next area, scare people then fight them, do some climbing, rinse and repeat. The only levels that were even remotely fun were the Batmobile levels.

In these levels, you get to drive the Tumbler and despite the goal just getting from point A to point B, the controls are fluid, you feel powerful being able to just almost immediately wreck cars, and it feels nice just zooming through the levels at blistering speed. Sadly, there are only two levels that involve the Tumbler and supposedly they weren't made by Eurocom, but instead Criterion, who made the Burnout franchise. Although, there is Time Attack, which is where you have to drive through previous levels involving the Tumbler and beat a set time. My only issue is how frustrating it is to complete because in order to beat the time you have to constantly use nitro to even have a chance to win and what doesn't help is the number of sharp corners you have to turn. If you don't want that, you can replay these missions whenever you want. In fact, they're the only levels with a level select as the game as a whole doesn't have one.

I don't really blame Eurocom for such a mediocre title. Seeing how the levels got shorter towards the end, tells me that they were on a time limit. That's not really abnormal for movie or TV licensed games, but I think that can summarize this entire game. It's just another movie-based cash grab from the 2000s.

(CONSOLE VERSION)
This is an absolutely solid movie game. Pre Arkham, this was definitely one of best Batman games you could play, nowadays....not so much! I enjoy the combat and the minor stealth elements this game provides. The 2 batmobile stages control better than the batmobile in Arkham Knight so they were pretty fun to play. , Graphically (on OG XBOX) the game has aged pretty well I'd say.

Begins is still a nice little time waster, u can beat this game in about a day or 2.

(GBA VERSION)
This is a nice short little action game with some decent challenge, I've been routing a Speedrun for it, the soundtrack is surprisingly excellent.