Batman Forever

"Souless Silicon"

I could have baited you with a catchy opening sentence questioning whether Acclaim did justice to the Batman Forever license with this game. I could have kept you reading by throwing out both good and bad points of the game, saving the clincher for the last few paragraphs. I could have used flowery language and rewarded the game for what it did right before revealing what went wrong. But I'm not going to lie to you or waste your time. The Batman Forever video game just plain sucks.

Ignoring the warning label that most bad video games have (the Acclaim logo), I recently took Batman Forever out of my stack of Genesis games, dusted it off, and plugged it into my system. Several days later, my head was still swimming. All right, try to visualize this: After being greeted with a lackluster title screen, hearing Two-Face annoyingly exclaim, “If the Bat wants to play, we'll play!” and skimming over a confusing weapon select screen, someone who looks kind of like Batman appears, surrounded by brown, grainy bricks, ugly gray columns and the occasional steel door. With him is another guy dressed like Robin, but he looks more like your eccentric neighbor wearing his ballet tights. Suddenly, an Arkham Asylum inmate shambles over and, after doing his victory pose a few times, eventually gets around to attacking! Sensing danger, “Robin” pulls out his staff, just like he never did in the film, and whacks the now flipping and kicking villain. But the Dynamic Duo isn't out of the woods yet! A door to one of the other cells explodes open (huh?) and out pops the same guy Robin just floored. Crazy acrobatic ninja inmates never learn! I guess it's time to beat him up again. And again. And again…

And that's pretty much the whole game. Wave after wave of the same few digitized villains battle our heroes' stunt doubles, performing the same few attacks over and over. Acclaim/Probe didn't even have the decency to change their pallets, so the only difference between enemies of the same type is their woefully dim-witted names. (My favorites are a guy named “Bad Gazz” and a clown named “Bio-Man.”) There are only five normal enemies and four boss-like characters, so the player is likely to grow bored of his or her competition at light speed. Likewise, each location is rather uninspired, with the same washed out, grainy look and banal feel.

Try as I may, I can't remember a single tune from this game. I'm holding the box in my hands right now – touching it, smelling it and practically begging it to jog my memory – but the only song that comes to mind is from Phantasy Star II. But that's not to say Batman Forever's music is bad, it just proves that it's entirely forgettable. (And that Phantasy Star II had some wicked tuneage, but I digress.) But don't worry, you'll be able to remember the melodies by the end of the game, because later levels reuse themes from the earlier ones. That's right – five mediocre songs are stretched over eight levels. If that doesn't say “rush job,” I don't know what does.

The sound effects are equally as bland. Every time your character grabs one of the Riddler's question marks, you're subjected to a tooth grinding “Riddle me this, riddle me that” sound clip. The enemies' comments aren't much better, each yelling some irritating remark whenever they kill your character. “Forgeddabout it!” yells the stereotypical mobster in a not-so-stereotypical yellow suit. Another enemy just growls. Yet, the player never hears a peep out of the Caped Crusader or the Boy Wonder, aside from a generic “I got knocked over” grunt that every character in the game shares. Throw in a few nonspecific punching noises, and you've got the Batman Forever soundtrack.

Holy unresponsive D-pad, Batman! These controls stink! Seeing as how Batman Forever passed through both Acclaim and Probe's inept hands, it's not surprising that this game plays a lot like Mortal Kombat. Actually, let me rephrase: This game wants to BE Mortal Kombat. With high and low punches and kicks, a block button, foot sweeps and even the trademark MK uppercut, Batman Forever is the video equivalent of a kid who tries to emulate his older, cooler sibling – and fails miserably. Punches and kicks come off without a hitch, but using the grappling hook is a chore. Instead of just holding up and hitting the grappling hook button to hoist to the next part of a level, the player has to tap the hook button, THEN quickly hold up on the D-pad. Needless to say, you miss more often than you hit the mark. And I'm still not sure how to make my character jump down a level, because the only thing that works is tapping down, block and low kick until he decides to move. Jump and tap up on the controller and Batman will float across the screen on leather wings. Robin… kind of sticks his bum out and starts levitating, though I've never quite been able to get that to work in real life. Both moves work about 50 percent of the time and are occasionally paramount to progressing through the game. The result is lots of senseless falling and backtracking.

Hey, remember that awesome part in the movie where Batman and Robin had to jump over all those exciting crates? …Yeah, neither do I, but it's in this game. It makes me wonder just what film the programmers were watching, because with a final product like this, there's no way it was Batman Forever. There are eight tough stages to slog through, but each one has little to do with the movie. Oddly, each level begins in one nondescript location and ends in another, so good luck trying to figure out what triggers the onset of the next stage. And even on easy mode, the game is much too unforgiving. Locating and disarming a bomb in the circus stage is a confusing process, with enemies appearing randomly and a quick-moving timer working against you. If you're not lucky, the bomb explodes and you lose a much-need life. (Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb, I guess.) There are some ridiculous jumps in the fifth level, an you'll often find yourself running all the way back to the spot where you fell, only to fall again. And a puzzle in the final round serves no other purpose but delay your progress. So, what's your reward for sticking out this entire hard, frustrating game? Let me save you some time: “Congratulations! Game complete.”

Yet all of this could have been overlooked if Batman Forever had managed to be fun, but it's really not. You see, the gameplay isn't just laughable, it's this game's killing joke. To be fair, any game where you get to beat up clowns can't be all bad, and uppercutting and roundhouse kicking your enemies can be fun, especially when you knock them into some sort of environmental trap or off the side of a building. Yet you never feel like you're doing much damage. Even a bone-shattering blast of Robin's stealthy staff steals but a fragment of the foe's life gauge. In games like Streets of Rage, one can smack around the bad guys a bunch of times in a few seconds, and a skilled player can employ a plethora of devastating combinations on unsuspecting enemies. But Batman Forever forces you to go hit by hit. It's all kind of like a chess match, only much longer and more pointless.

To help remedy the monotony of the limited combat system, the programmers added plenty of special weapons to the fighting formula. However, it's always easier to just kick and punch your adversaries into submission, because trying to use a bat-gadget will get you bat-killed. There are 20 of the little buggers in all, but most of them do the same thing. Take, for example, the Bat Bola. Toss it at an opponent, and it wraps around him, constricting his movement. Then there's the Sticky Goo, which immobilizes enemies by sticking them to the floor; the Flash Pellet, which blinds foes so they stop moving; and the Gas Gun, which – you guessed it – stops bad guys in their tracks. Each gadget is activated with a Street Fighter-like button combination, but seriously, the player shouldn't have to do a Yoga Flame motion to fling a weak gimmick weapon at some schmoe across the screen.

Yes, you can drag someone else along with you into this lunacy, but why would you? The controls are so broken in the main game that you'll find yourself explaining to the other player how to use the grappling hook more often than pounding on the bad guys. It's a shame too, because there was some real potential for fun here. Instead, it's just as frustrating – if not more so – as the rest of the game. The versus mode fares better though, because it allows two players to choose any character in the game (possibly even the Riddler, via a code I can't get working) and mix it up mano a mano. It kind of plays like a crippled Mortal Kombat and offers players a welcome respite from the tedium of the main game.

Some games seem to have a soul – a soul of silicon, but a soul nonetheless. Yet despite my greatest hopes, this is not one of them. I try to find the good in all video games, for even in the crappy ones, there are usually a few tidbits worth seeing. However, Batman Forever has tried my patience, and the only reason it didn't receive a lower score is because the game can actually be completed if the player can deal with the masses of uninteresting villains and the tiresome gameplay. Avoid Batman Forever if you come across it, but if you simply must see what all the fuss is about, don't spend more than $2 on it. Save yourself three hours of aggravation and watch the lackluster movie instead; at least when that starts to suck, you can go to sleep and when you wake up, it'll be over. Better still, dig up some episodes of Batman: The Animated Series for your Dark Knight fix – the worst installment of that show is at least twice as good as this piece of garbage.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 04/08/08

Game Release: Batman Forever (US, 1995)