Despite not being a fan of story experiences and walking simulators, I tend to really enjoy Telltale Games’ products. I’ve never read the Batman comics but have watched some cartoons and all the films so I am somewhat familiar with the general story of Batman. I’ve recently played the first season of this series.
The first game made a revelation that the Wayne’s amassed their riches by illegitimate means which tarnishes the Wayne legacy. In this game, Bruce uses that to his advantage by going undercover as a new recruit in “The Pact” which comprises of Harley Quinn, Bane, John Doe (Joker), and Mr Freeze.
Like the other Telltale Games, it has plenty of twists and turns and gives you a good illusion of choice (even if your choices don’t really matter until the final episode).
You really feel like you are managing your relationships with the cast, which largely focuses on John Doe. John calls you a friend and wants you to repay the favour after he helped you escape Arkham Asylum in the first season. This gets you into The Pact where you need to convince the crew that you are one of them. With John’s erratic behaviour, you can’t quite tell if he is being sincere; does he really want to be your friend, and does he actually believe you want to be his?
This time, there are barely any scenes as Batman, and therefore you aren’t making decisions based on managing the reputation of Bruce vs Batman. The decisions are based on managing relationships with The Pact and managing your relationships with the few people in law enforcement.
The fights mainly involve pressing WASD and QE, then it throws in the combination of Shift + E/Q for finishing moves. There’s no hammering buttons - it is just single key presses. In the previous game, some scenes ask you to plan out your attacks in advance so you can choose whether to slam enemies into a table, or into another enemy etc. These choices are still here but this time you decide moment to moment - so the fight slows down for a couple of seconds to wait for your input.
I didn’t fail any fight scenes in the first game, but I did in this game, usually because I didn’t make a choice in time, or the more complex input took me by surprise. Failing takes you too far back in the cutscene in my opinion.
Outside the fights, sometimes you need to right-click then move in a direction. I was a bit confused with these inputs because sometimes it seemed to register the mouse movement, whereas others it seemed to register if I tapped the corresponding keyboard button.
There’s a few detective sections like the first game but they don’t feature as regularly. These were a good idea in principle but these are usually too simplistic because there’s not enough objects. So you might look at a dead body and look at a torture device and obviously you are going to link both and it's usually the correct thing. Once you have matched all the clues, then Batman deduces what happened in the scene. It’s a nice idea but it needed to be enhanced further to perfect it. I liked the theme of some of these which were Riddler “escape rooms” but there should have been more of them.
I think I prefer the first season since it had more variety with the Batman/Bruce dynamic and the relationships with Catwoman, Harvey and Alfred seemed more developed. I did like the story in this season but the relationships were often fake (based on deception), although you had a certain degree of sympathy for some characters, especially John. Mr Freeze doesn’t get enough scenes, and Alfred takes a backseat for a large part of the game. Harley is a great character and it is interesting that she is the one that is manipulating John whereas the standard Joker character is the reverse. I’d think I’d still score them the same though.