The posterchild for how rampant capitalism can fuck over raw passion and craftsmanship.
What's here checks all the boxes for a fantastic Treasure-style action game: A seamless blend of melee and run-and-gun combat, insane visual effects and setpieces, a gorgeous color palette that perfectly sets the mood, and great authenticity to the source material's spirit. But all these strengths get impeded by the game's artificial difficulty and padding.
Bosses are fun, but they're also disgusting damage sponges, and most stages run about twice as long as they aught to. The worst offender is the shmup section, which might be the most egregious pace-breaker in any game I've ever played. And it's a shame that it's like this, because I don't actually think any of this game's difficulty is unfair: Bosses telegraph their attacks very creatively, and there's a surprising lot of depth to Batman's limited moveset. But when the stages start dragging and you keep making mistakes out of impatience, it gets held back where Treasure's games persisted. I can only assume the artificial difficulty and length was a higher-up's demand in order to threaten the rental market, like most mid-90's licensed games did.
There IS a fan hack called 'Batadvantage' that aims to reduce the game's difficulty, but all it actually does is give you more lives and keep your Batarang at full charge. It's a nice way to breeze through the game if you're curious, but it doesn't fix any of the stage padding or that damn shmup section. It also makes the combat less appealing, since your melee attacks suck compared to your shots.
I hope someday someone does a more robust hack that globally reduces the boss health and trims the stage length by a bit - hell, I'd do that if I knew how to. Had this game released a bit earlier in the Genny's lifetime, I imagine most of these issues wouldn't have existed and it would've been ALL the better for it.
What's here checks all the boxes for a fantastic Treasure-style action game: A seamless blend of melee and run-and-gun combat, insane visual effects and setpieces, a gorgeous color palette that perfectly sets the mood, and great authenticity to the source material's spirit. But all these strengths get impeded by the game's artificial difficulty and padding.
Bosses are fun, but they're also disgusting damage sponges, and most stages run about twice as long as they aught to. The worst offender is the shmup section, which might be the most egregious pace-breaker in any game I've ever played. And it's a shame that it's like this, because I don't actually think any of this game's difficulty is unfair: Bosses telegraph their attacks very creatively, and there's a surprising lot of depth to Batman's limited moveset. But when the stages start dragging and you keep making mistakes out of impatience, it gets held back where Treasure's games persisted. I can only assume the artificial difficulty and length was a higher-up's demand in order to threaten the rental market, like most mid-90's licensed games did.
There IS a fan hack called 'Batadvantage' that aims to reduce the game's difficulty, but all it actually does is give you more lives and keep your Batarang at full charge. It's a nice way to breeze through the game if you're curious, but it doesn't fix any of the stage padding or that damn shmup section. It also makes the combat less appealing, since your melee attacks suck compared to your shots.
I hope someday someone does a more robust hack that globally reduces the boss health and trims the stage length by a bit - hell, I'd do that if I knew how to. Had this game released a bit earlier in the Genny's lifetime, I imagine most of these issues wouldn't have existed and it would've been ALL the better for it.
2 Comments
that whole flying stage sucks ass lmao you just gotta tough through it
C_F
2 years ago