Holy Rubbish Port, Batman! As a game it fails in its most basic requirement - gameplay.
User Rating: 4.8 | Batman: Vengeance PC
There can be no doubt that Warner Bros' excellent animated Batman series pulled the whole Batman "franchise" out of a very deep hole. This game, a PC port of a PS2, X-Box and Gamecube game released in 2001, does its level best to throw it back in. While nowhere near bad enough to succeed, it certainly does enough to solly the name of Batman, already smarting over the dreadful fourth film in the Batman movie series. From what should have been described as a brilliantly worked and scripted opening sequence, we are given horrible, grainy video in which you can barely see what's going on. On any of the other platforms these would have been made to look pristine and colourful, so why the developers chose to present us with this choppy mess is anyone's guess. It's a shame really, because otherwise, they're really good cutscenes, full of action, drama, and humour. The controls are almost criminal, like the Joker himself wrote them. And don't get me started on the camera. When players see the instruction "Press the spacebar twice to return the camera behind Batman", they have an automatic right to put the disk back in its box, and return it to the place of purchase. It simply isn't good enough to implement such a lazy workaround and present it as world's best practice. It doesn't always work, either. Batman: Vengeance has one of video game history's worst ever cameras, leading to some completely unnecessary frustrations on the player's part. Far too often, the player will plunge to his/her death, for no other reason than they were trying to get a better point-of-view. The meat of the game, the combat, is well handled. The whole business of having to handcuff criminals that you knock down lest they get back up is rather ridiculous, cheapening the Dark Knight's ability to lay the smackdown on dem criminals. The puzzles are functional enough, but some of the solutions aren't the slightest bit apparent. The haphazzard camera provides yet another hurdle to this problem, as key jumps and objects are hidden where the camera doesn't want to go. As stories go, it's not too bad - a branching, overlapping tale of conspiracy, kicked off by a mysterious woman strapped to a bomb, claiming her son has been kidnapped by the Joker. The selection of villians is well picked, although perhaps they should have thrown a curve in with the usual suspects, like the Penguin, Scarface, Bane or Clayface. Alas, a lot of the twists and turns can be second-guessed by the player, so you can pretty much guess how the story will unfold. When there's a mystery to be had, you'd think that the cards would be held close to the chest, but the clues appear too thick and fast. The game's saving grace is the excellent voice acting. Fans of the animated series will be please to hear that the whole cast is well represented. From Batman's world-weary tones to the Joker's insane banter, to Harly Quinn's "New Yoiker" worblings, everything is exactly as you would find in an episode of the animated series. Unfortunately, this is NOT an episode of the animated series, and as a game it fails in its most basic requirement - gameplay. How much of Batman: Vengeance was broken before it got to the PC is unknown, but instead of fixing those problems, the programmers decided to add their own to the mix. It's a sorry state of affairs and one that does not bide well for the future of console-to-PC ports. If the PC version was going to be to much like hard work, maybe it shouldn't have been made in the first place. All in all, Batman: Vengeance is a poor inditement on the Batman name and of ports in general. 
