Who programed the controls in this game? The Riddler?

User Rating: 3.5 | Batman Forever SNES
Batman Forever marked the beginning of the end for the original Batman Movie Series, returing the mighty Dark Knight back to the formula of the campy 1960s TV Show, complete with flashy colors, over the top villians, and Batman reduced from being the Dark Knight to the Dork Knight. The reason: too many people complained about Batman Returns being too dark and violent, as a result you get the film the Studio heads and mom and dad wanted: a fun safe film for the children, and what big hollywood blockbuster would be complete without a video game adaptation? Enter the King of Bad Movie Based Games: Acclaim.

From the get go, the player will probably notice similarites to Acclaim's most famous port: Mortal Kombat, complete with digitized graphics, tricky special moves. However, Batman Forever isn't a fighting game, but a streets of rage/final fight style beat-em-up, through which the player, controling eitehr Batman or Robin, must fight their way through to the end of the stage.

While this alone would have probably garnared the game a rating of at least 4 or 5, except for one small problem: THE CONTROLS ARE MUTALATED!!!!!! In most games the controls are failry simple: Directional Pad/Joystick controls the characters movements, you have a jump button, punch button, kick button and a fire button for your weapons. But in Batman Forever the controls are more like the sequence of buttons you press to preform a fatality or special move in a fighting game. For example to preform a simple move like going down a hole, the R button has to be tapped sliglty before you press down, and to use your weapons you have to press a certain sequence of buttons in a certain order.

Had the controls not been so criptic, the game might actually have faired better in terms of it's game play. Over all Batman Forever will only appeal to fans of the Batman series and collectors who want a complete SNES library.