Telltale made one of the best Batman stories ever told, and it's really cool how this game inspired the excellent new Batman movie directed by Matt Reeves. I played this on the Xbox 360 for the achievements, and for a game made in 2016 with next-gen hardware in mind, it's not the worst way to play the game. The framerate is decent, but it can lag from time to time. The graphics have a major downgrade due to the limits of the hardware, but it wasn't that distracting. Playing the 360 version of this game is pointless unless you want some easy gamerscore.

The sequel is definitely better than this one, but it's an alright lead-up to it. I'm not much of a fan of the graphics change Telltale went with here - the models look kind of plastic-y and Lego-like to me, oddly shiny and artificial in comparison to their natural cell-shading in games like The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us - but I get used to it after a while of playing every time.

Love that you can play Batman as a bit of an immoral asshole, love that you can lean into the Bruce as an elitist playboy thing. Troy Baker is, as per usual, pretty good in his role as the protagonist.

I wasn't sure how to feel about the treatment of the Joker when I first played this, and I think if it had been this game alone it would've felt hamfisted and out of place, but it's a build up to his bigger role in the second game where he turned out to be a fantastic character with a fantastic dynamic with Bruce, so with that in mind it's more than forgivable.

The major issue I have with this game is just that... I don't want to fuck Catwoman. And the game really, really wants me to fuck Catwoman. A lot of Telltale games have this kind of canon romance that you're nudged towards with varying degrees of force - Lee and Carley in The Walking Dead, Bigby and Snow in The Wolf Among Us, Rhys and Sasha in Tales from the Borderlands - but this is up there with the worst ones in terms of making me feel like I was required to put active, constant effort into not tripping and falling into a relationship with the character they wanted me to.

Still, fun enough game overall. Play it for the sequel, if nothing else.

(Sidenote I include with all Telltale reviews: Telltale's games often get a bad rap for having your choices not influence the story, but to me this misses the point of what they do. Variant endings are a nice bonus in games, and I enjoy them when they do pop up in Telltale's stories, but for the most part your choices aren't here to change where you go. They're there to change how you get there, who you are when you get there, and often who you get there with. They influence and change your relationships with the characters around you. The joy of replaying these games is to experience the different dialogue, the different reactions to you, the different routes you can take on the way, the different bonds you can evolve with people - not to have a wildly different ending. I think this aspect is overhated and sadly misunderstood by a lot of players, so if huge, game-changing differences are what you're looking for, I'd temper your expectations.)

Favourite Male Character: Alfred
Favourite Female Character: Vicki
First Character I Liked: Oswald
Favourite Character Design: Oswald
Favourite Moment: Being injected with the serum and the subsequent villain reveal
Least Favourite Character: Not gonna lie boys Harvey bored the shit outta me after a while