A classic in the open world action genre. Rather than try to rephrase the familiar line, I'll say what I think the game actually succeeds and fails to accomplish in putting you in the role of Batman.

There's a really good style and weight to the combat in the game. A weight primarily carried by the strength of the animations and the camera movements. You get a nice slow down for grapples and take-downs followed by a dramatic speed up as Batman delivers that final crushing blow to some poor guys throat and sends him sailing through the air. Putting so much focus on these moments makes it obvious they put a lot of work into making all of Batman's animations look as realistic as possible, in a comic book hero way of course. Nearly every hit feels natural and fluid and it honestly never really gets old. It's not perfect, however. There area plenty of moments where Batman glides awkwardly across a waxed floor in order to kick the next guy in line. But I actually appreciate that the game would rather stretch my disbelief occasionally on the animations in order to preserve the combat experience. I'd be way more annoyed in the reverse situation if I dropped a combo because the game wasn't willing to nudge Batman a bit.

As a narrative, I don't think it's all that spectacular. It's a comic book story, there's one-liners and contrivances everywhere. As a fan I can appreciate how faithfully they tried to adapt so many different elements of a huge franchise, and you do kind of feel like a force of nature with how much shit the game puts this guy through. My biggest complaint would be that so many of the side villains get underutilized. If the choice was between including so many versus using a few of them more effectively I'd have taken the latter for sure. Mr. Freeze, for example, is used to perfection. I'd have them cut several of the side missions if they could elevate just one of them to his level.

My favorite thing about the game is the rhythm of the encounters. You bounce between simple street fights, complex stealth rooms, and unique set pieces quite frequently. There's a good difficulty curve for new players that keeps you quite engaged as you acquire new gadgets and watch your enemies step up their attempts to kill you. However I think this difficulty curve falls off quite dramatically once you get a handle on the combat and learn to effectively use quickfire gadgets. You reach a point where the game is basically incapable of challenging you anymore. All new game plus can offer is taking away the counter icon, a move that does increase the difficulty but doesn't really make the game any more fun.

What the game does offer though is a really robust set of challenge maps and modes. The complete edition features four characters and I think something like 24-30 maps with unique challenge requirements, plus a campaign mode that strings those maps together with challenge modifiers you have to apply to yourself. I found that the combat maps eventually still became kind of effortlessly easy, but the stealth focused predator maps actually went on to provide a lot of unique challenges that kept me playing for hours. The additional characters are a little basic but they also provide a bit of nice variety to the mix, I only wish you didn't have to grind out each challenge on every map and campaign on each character individually.

My recent play-through took somewhere around 80 hours to take a new save file to 100% completion. I felt the grind for sure on some of those challenge maps but I had a fantastic time revisiting a game that I loved on release. I'd encourage anyone to check this game out and if you enjoy the combat, spend some time in the challenge maps to really get the most out of your experience.

I'm surprised by how much I liked this game. Going in I was very worried, the trailers gave me "trying too hard to be quirky and funny" vibes. But I was glad to find that wasn't the case at all.

What I got was a short but sweet collectathon that was full of creativity. I liked just being in this world, finding out new silly details about the characters and setting. The story wraps up just about when the bug catching starts to get a bit repetitive.

I had an enjoyable time going for all the achievements. You get into a good rhythm of picking up a quest, tracking down the snax you need, and figuring out an effective way to collect them. I think I would have liked to see more quests that weren't just: "get me these exact 3 bugs". The fun for me came from trying to be really intentional and efficient with my quests, trying to see how many I could get done at once. But the game doesn't do a fantastic job at rewarding that effort once you develop a decent understanding of how to catch snax quickly.

Overall this was a really pleasant and entertaining experience. It starts to scratch that Pokemon snap itch of being in a responsive world that fuels experimentation. I think I'd really appreciate a sequel that pushes the game even further in that direction.