Batman: Dark Tomorrow

"Batman: Dismal Tomorrow. Why you should try it."

I read all the reviews on this reputedly abysmal game but somehow I was still intrigued, and picked up a used copy for 14.99. There were after all a few (though an admitted very few) gamers who had claimed to like it at least to some degree, and some who say that given patience, one could find some value in it. I had some hope. I was actually expecting to like it myself.

As I left the store with it, along with a 2003 year-in-review gaming magazine I picked up at the same time, I ironically found that the magazine had just labeled Batman: Dark Tomorrow as #1 worst game of 2003. That said, let me tell you about about some things you won't like but could get used, things which don't necessarily make it a ''bad'' game. But I'll tell you also specifically the one and only reason why it IS a bad game. And believe it or not, I'll tell you also some things you may not have heard elsewhere that may make you want to try it.

After playing for an hour or so, I was absolutely hating it, actually in awe at its ineptness, and I had a whole other review in mind. But I figured I would play further so I could get more facts. I was compelled to play on, and what do you know, I did end up liking it somewhat despite that one and only flaw which absolutely kills it.

My first disappointment, which provides a good example of the lack of polish found in the game as a whole, was the rudimentary character stats screens. You are given a 3D picture of the selected character slowly rotating beside their stats. As you switch from character to character, the character model rotation stays the same while the ''skins'' change, so that if you switch to look at, say, Robin, you are forced to look at his butt for 10 long seconds before he finally turns all the way around so you can get a look at his face. So if you are just casually flipping through to see who's there in the roster, you will see the fronts of the first few, and the backs of the last few, unless you do a lot of waiting. Instinctually a gamer in this day and age will try to find the buttons to manually rotate the character model 360 degrees in some if not all directions, and find a fluid zoom in/zoom out. But all you are given is a paltry two-distance (full body then headshot) zoom in and a zoom out command to look at the character model as it slowly, so slowly rotates like some sparkly bauble on a shopping network. They could at least have been animated (breathing, blinking, something), but instead they are absolutely and eerily lifeless, stuffed and mounted like Charlton Heston's shipmates in Planet of the Apes. Its all just very queer and unpolished.

About the gameplay, I need to set straight some misconceptions about the control. I really don’t see why so many people seem to have a problem with the opening rooftop section. It’s very easy; each building you are supposed to swing to is highlighted on your radar map. Or you could even just go in the direction of the bat signal if you want to turn the radar off, sheesh. I don’t know why people seem to think you are supposed to use your bat cable in mid air (and consequently fall a lot). This is Batman, not Spider-man, people. You go to the edge of the building, use the bat cable, he swings to the next building, and you hit the A button to flip forwards off your cable and onto the building, or use the B button to drop straight down if you are afraid you will go too far. No, it isn't quite clear what exactly the cable is latching onto, but there's no reason to try to think about it that hard.

Jumping isn’t a problem like I heard; if you want to jump forward and up at the same time and can’t, I don’t know what your problem is. However, I did have a problem at the exact same spot I read someone else mention. The chain-link fence near the beginning of the game. Tried the tool, door wouldn’t unlock. Fine, there’s a car right there, I’ll stand on it and try to jump over. Great. Success on the first attempt; I jumped, he grabbed and hung, and somehow I made him pull himself over and land on the other side. Then I got mowed down with machinegun fire, and when I hit continue, I started back on the original side of the fence. OK, no problem, I’ll just hop on this car again… and allyoop! OK, missed, let me try again… Allyoop! What the? …. And I kid you not, I spent close to 30 minutes trying to grab the top of that fence again. Talk about beginner’s luck. I finally learned later that this is what you have to do: whenever you want to ensure that Bats will grab a ledge, jiggle the directional stick in the direction of the ledge, and he will grab every time. Its just that simple. Queer programming, frustrating if you don't know, but just that simple.

I read many complaints about Batman only having a punch and a kick. It is obvious that these folks rented or bought used with no instruction book, or just didn't pay attention or experiment well. You hold the L button down for combos, and Batman will wail on a badguy if you do. He's got a non-combo jumping roundhouse kick that most times knock down an enemy if you use it (sometimes it's used automatically as part of a combo), and of course there is also the ground sweep, and strategically using the back-flip and the double-jump forward flip during a fight is a joy.

I don't know why people harp on seeing the cuffing animation over and over. What's the big deal? It's something that Batman has to do, its something that realistically should take a couple of seconds to perform, and judging how much time you have to safely perform the task is really a part of the gameplay. What's wrong with seeing him do it? It is part of the game, not a repetitive cut-scene as some reviews seem to imply.

The one thing I can say about the frustration of Mr. Freeze freezing your feet repeatedly... Hello, keep your dern feet off the ground while in front of him. (Jump, you people, and try to stay out of his sights!) I had that one figured out before I even played the game!

Getting to the actually ''bad,'' let me say this about the trial-and-error gameplay factor (which really only exists as a result of the following described situation). I don’t mind so much a programmer trying to keep me on his pre-ordained path; heck, put up an invisible wall if you feel you have to to keep me on track (ala Two Towers), as cheap as that is. But in this game, you cannot believe it, they put up death zones. These are not deaths caused by off-camera enemies, because sometimes you can see directly ahead to the building across the street, having just come up an empty alley, and there is no enemy at all on the radar. Take another step and suddenly someone has called in an air-strike on Batman. You can even SEE THE MISSILES FALLING, I kid you not, as Batman is blasted by explosions and hammered with ghostly gunfire until he is dead. Most times you cannot run away once it starts, because you will be knocked down, and as soon as you get back on your feet, you are knocked down again, until you are dead. I experimented once to see how far I could get, using all my medical kit to stay alive a little longer and I just did make it out once, with no health or medkit left. What in THE hell, Kemco? But OK, that is just in the first street levels, and maybe it is explained in the story. Batman is investigating an illegal arms shipment that has something to do with a gang war taking place, and he does pick up some anti-tank weaponry as some sort of clue, and there is something in the opening FMV that shows a satellite which maybe explains the air strikes. Maybe I should pay more attention to the clues and movies, but I, like a lot of folks, just want to play. Maybe if I had used my nightvision goggles maybe I could have seen a big red target on the ground, I don't know; I'll have to investigate that later. Unfortunately, I hadn't discovered the coolness and utility of the nightvision goggles until later in the game. But I'll get to that later. I'm addressing the ''bad'' stuff first.

So now for the unacceptably bad. Before my purchase, I had read many gripes about the Resident Evil style camera and off-screen enemies, but I figured I could get past that quite easily; I actually like that camera system (definitely in the context of the RE series) and looked forward to that style of gameplay, off-camera enemies and all. However, this is not something I really thought about beforehand: In RE, if you have an enemy in front of you who is off screen, you can shoot at them. They, on the other hand, having no guns, cannot shoot at you. Here the situation is the exact opposite. Being Batman, you cannot shoot at them (batarangs aside), but they most definitely will mow you down with their machinegun fire as you blindly try to run for cover, or try to run to them to punch them out before you die.

The problem with running anywhere, though, is the one and only real flaw which puts a bullet in this game's head: the notorious camera/control scheme. You may run away from the gunfire to seek cover, and as you cross an unanticipated camera view-switching point, end up running right back into the gunfire. Vice versa, if you are trying to run to the perpetrator to knock them down, as soon as you get close to them the exact same thing could happen, only this time you are running away from them right back into their I-can’t-touch-you-but-you-can-mow-me-down firing range. Holy insert-expletive-here, Batman. For the few GC owners out there that have played the vs. mode of Buffy: Chaos Bleeds, you can almost hear the fight announcer shout ''Controller Confusion!'' each and everytime the camera switches viewpoints.

The RE camera system, whose purpose is to make a game more ''cinematic,'' absolutely REQUIRES character control be RELATIVE (up is always forward relative to your character, like operating an RC vehicle) or the game DOES NOT WORK. Mixing this camera system with the industry-predominant ABSOLUTE control scheme (up makes your character go deeper into your TV screen, no matter which way they were initially facing) has turned out to be the ultimate crime in gaming design and an affront to common sense; it is incomprehensible that it was not realized and fixed there at Kemco, to my knowledge the only boneheads to even try it. (The little white trail on Batman's map does little to compensate for this major, major flaw; it is of minimal help even when there are no enemies around.) Maybe the developers thought they were doing us a favor by not having the RE character control, as people tend to whine about it. If so, look at the trouble that whining has caused. The fixed, angle-switching, cinematic camera is the only reason that Capcom still uses that character control scheme which you hate for their RE series, because it is a necessity for keeping the fixed camera which defines RE. But you can't have the RE camera without the RE control. That is why B: DT fails---the incompatible camera/character-control scheme. And that is no one's fault but Kemco. Even more sadly, the fixed camera angles are not even ''cinematic,'' they're boring, and contribute nothing to the atmosphere of the game. So when you boil it down, it is really Kemco's choice to go with the fixed camera that ruins the game. This is why the game is virtually unplayable as a primarily 3rd person adventure.

This brings me straight to the one redeeming quality of the game: The first-person view without which the game would be utterly useless. To a lesser degree, the 1st person peeking around corners for safe batarang shots, but namely, the night vision goggles. The night vision goggles are cool, and turn this game into something different. Only by using them can you leave the camera/control issues behind, as your eyes become the camera. Air-stirikes aside, enemies are never off-screen (unless they are hiding, which sometimes they do), and you always know what direction you are going, because nothing ever switches on you. I do not recall ever reading about that. Unlike the batarang-o-vision where you become rooted to one spot, you can move around in this first person view, and though the controls are strange, you can get used to them, unlike the camera/3rd-person-control scheme, which I honestly cannot see how anyone can get used to. Needless to say, I ended up playing the majority of the game with the nightvision goggles on. Control as I said will take some getting used to, as the look-around is touchy (can be jittery), and if you want to simulate a strafing motion to peek around corners you have to turn your head while walking forwards to achieve that sort of motion. I was surprised to find that in this view you can do most everything Batman can do in 3rd person: walk, run, sneak, crouch, jump, do your back-flip retreat or crouch-back-up, fight (though you can't see your fists/feet you can see/feel/hear ''hits'' when you contact something), pull off combos, cuff enemies, open doors (though Batman will turn the goggles off to go through the door), even go directly to your batarang or other gadgets while using your goggles. Turning the goggles off is problematic once you've switched to another gadget, but you'll figure it out. The one thing you can't do is lean up against walls to peek; you have to exit the goggles to go into that mode. You will find yourself turning them off every so often to check the environment out from a different view, to jump/grab onto something, and to fight, but leave them on and you will really enjoy the game.

This coupled with the stealth aspects of B: DT makes for a very fun experience. While inferior in every way to Hitman 2 and also to the soon-to-be-released Twin Snakes (in first person/stealth Gamecube context), here you get to be Batman. If you are a patient gamer who owns a GC and who is also a fan of the Batman comic book, I can lukewarmly recommend it as a bargain-bin purchase. The extra art and music CDs are lame when you get right down to it, but being able to play each cinema you unlock from the extras menu is good; you can essentially have a decent, computer-animated, comic-book-true Batman movie when your done, which you will not get anywhere else.

Worst game of 2003? Yes. Can it still be fun? Yes, but you need to know the facts first, so that you don't break the game disc within the first hour. I have just given you the facts so that you can decide if you want to give it a try.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 01/25/04