Batman: The Telltale Series: The Review

Batman: The Telltale Series: The Review

Score: 8 out of 10

Overview: "Batman: The Telltale Series is a compelling story with rich character portrayals and a unique spin on Batman’s iconic villains, like Two-Face and Penguin, while also building some intriguing villains of its own like Lady Arkham. The game's fresh narrative offers a strong introduction to Telltale's Batman universe, although with some small issues when it comes to the unique minigames. Despite these minor flaws, it’s a must-play for fans looking for a new take on Gotham’s dark knight."

Overview: The review does contain some spoilers so if you haven't played the game yet, we recommend to do so and only read the review afterwards.

The Positives

• Batman:The Telltale Series bring a fresh perspective into the mythos of Batman by allowing the player to explore both sides of his life and choices outside the cowl—a unique approach in a genre that often centers exclusively on Batman’s actions;
• The storyline has to be praised for its dark and gritty tone, blending familiar elements with unexpected takes on the Batman formula, such as the portrayal of Bruce’s family dark secrets and their impact on his life​;
• The voice acting is one of the strongest made by Telltale, with every characters bringing a nuanced and emotional take on several characters including Bruce Wayne itself, Alfred, Harvey Dent and Selina Kyle;
• The game perfectly balances its pace across action, detective work, and intense dialogue-driven scenes, making it feel like a cohesive story with several sides of Bruce Wayne's life;
• The episodic structure (a usual for Telltale) allows the game to explore several storylines and villains without making the game feel bloated and disconnected. This also allows the player to explore different and diverse locations such as Wayne Enterprises, Arkham Asylum and the GCPD;
• Lady Arkham is a perfect character to pit against Bruce Wayne/Batman on this first season of his story by making a direct victim of his father's sins take center stage, allowing Batman to reflect and literally face his father's demons face to face;
• The game's choices also blur the line between good and evil, making a lot of choices to fall onto that morally gray area, allowing the player to think about the decisions they made long after they put down the controller.
• The art style really makes us feel like we are inside of a comic book by creating this "visual novel" look that really makes it unique in presentation.

The Negatives

• During our playthrough we faced several visual glitches, especially when it came to smoke (for example, when Gordon was smoking throughout the game) and shadows. It did become distracting in some scenarios so it does unfortunately contribute in decreasing the review score;
• The Penguin's portrayal felt very one-note to us, ending up being our least favourite take done by Telltale. We understand he was more of a villain focused on Bruce Wayne and not Batman but, besides his "hacking the Bat Tech", he didn't add much to the story besides that. His visual identity also felt drastically downgraded from the usual portrayal of this iconic villain from Batman's rogues gallery;
• The mini-game that makes us link pieces of evidence is for us the worst feature of these games (even if they're simplified and reduced in The Enemy Within). Sometimes they felt very random and hard to solve and drastically slowed the game's pace down to a grinding halt.

The Experience

For us, Batman: The Telltale Series is one of the strongest stories told by Telltale, with huge potential to improve in its sequel (Spoiler Alert: It did improve). It took us about 10 hours to complete and platinum the game, however, we do feel that we will definitely come back to this story in the future to explore Gotham in a whole different perspective so that game time is very likely to increase in the future.