Yet another game I loved when I was 8 that holds up about as well as the Captain Underpants fanfiction I wrote at the same age. Starting to think I may not have had very good taste back then!
There's so much fundamentally wrong with Vengeance's game design, it's honestly kind of impressive. Every play mechanic feels horrible to engage with, from the awful FPS gadgets to the miserable melee combat to even the freaking character movement. I don't understand how you can mess up "push analog stick to move in specified direction" but I have somehow managed to play two different 6th gen superhero games in a row that did so in distinctly different ways. Batman at least moves in the direction you want him to, but regardless of how much you tilt the stick, he must always "build up speed" by slowly walking for half a second before running. This makes the platforming segments even more painful than the limp jumping and inconsistent ledge-grabbing already did.
The visual style is pretty cool, though. They did a great job translating the artwork from the later Batman animated series episodes into 3D, even if the models don't animate particularly well. The FMVs also look weirdly shiny and plasticky, but I kind of love that aesthetic tbh. The voice acting is pretty good too (with the same actors from the cartoon!), but the sound mixing is so horrendous you won't even be able to hear it half the time. There are even some interesting cinematic gameplay moments that feel ahead of their time in a way. All this rounds out Vengeance as a fun curiosity despite how bad it is to actually experience.
There's so much fundamentally wrong with Vengeance's game design, it's honestly kind of impressive. Every play mechanic feels horrible to engage with, from the awful FPS gadgets to the miserable melee combat to even the freaking character movement. I don't understand how you can mess up "push analog stick to move in specified direction" but I have somehow managed to play two different 6th gen superhero games in a row that did so in distinctly different ways. Batman at least moves in the direction you want him to, but regardless of how much you tilt the stick, he must always "build up speed" by slowly walking for half a second before running. This makes the platforming segments even more painful than the limp jumping and inconsistent ledge-grabbing already did.
The visual style is pretty cool, though. They did a great job translating the artwork from the later Batman animated series episodes into 3D, even if the models don't animate particularly well. The FMVs also look weirdly shiny and plasticky, but I kind of love that aesthetic tbh. The voice acting is pretty good too (with the same actors from the cartoon!), but the sound mixing is so horrendous you won't even be able to hear it half the time. There are even some interesting cinematic gameplay moments that feel ahead of their time in a way. All this rounds out Vengeance as a fun curiosity despite how bad it is to actually experience.