PS3

I played through this again last night after putting the PS3 on to watch Resident Evil: Degeneration. (It’s not awful, but not great. The action’s good and the plot seems okay, but the actual way the plot is told is woeful.)

I spent a lot of time playing with the final bad guy in the final room by bouncing my batarang off walls and railings behind him, terrifying him and panicking him into spraying bullets into the dark. Great fun.

“I’m Batman.”

No, really, I am. This game, you see, lets me be The Batman in a way no other game ever has. And not just any Batman, but a Kevin Conroy-voiced Batman going up against a Mark Hamill-voiced Joker and Arleen Sorkin-voiced Harley Quinn. Which is to say, that if you were ever a fan of Batman: The Animated Series, then you’ll be emitting little of squeals of fanboy/fangirl glee as soon as the characters open their mouths. And if you’ve never seen the cartoon these voices come from, then you’re still in for a treat, because these actors know their characters, have lots of experience in voicing them and just sound right.

The graphics look good. Okay, everyone might be a little too Gears of War-bulky, but we can ignore that. In every other way, this looks great – especially detective mode, which lets you see through walls and highlights things of interest, such as baddies and gargoyles.

How does the game play, though?

Well, it starts off as a tutorial. You punch and kick some bad guys. You throw a Batarang. You sneak up behind people and incapacitate them. It’s all good fun, though would be unexceptional if you weren’t, you know, being the goddamn Batman.

The final bit of the demo, though, just gives you a room and four bad guys with guns. (Well, the room has five goons in it, but one starts with his back to you right by the entrance, so he’s a freebie and doesn’t really count.) Guns are bad for your health, so you really need to take the bad guys one by one, unseen. It’s a mutli-level room, with ladders, gantries, gargoyles and ducts. That sort of thing.

Sometimes it all goes wrong and you desperately swing away from machine gun fire, while feeling less like The Batman and more like Del Boy in that hilarious episode at the funeral.

Sometimes, though, it all goes right. And when it does… oh boy. I’m sitting here smiling just thinking about it. Popping out from a grating under the floor and taking someone out from behind. Swooping down, kicking them, disappearing back into the shadows. Throwing a line down and leaving them hanging upside-down while their heart-rate monitor reads “Terrified”. It’s, well, it’s pretty much the perfect Batman game.

I’m now as excited by the the thought of all the challenge rooms as I am by the main game. This is a real Batman game. It’s Batman from the ground-up. It’s Batman done right.

If the full game can live up to the promise of the final room of the demo – which, yes, remains to be seen – Fuel may well have to surrender its “game of the year” title.

Of course, I’m a massive Batman fanboy. For pity’s sake, before I had a super cool gaming blog I ran a nerdy Batman fan fiction site. (No, really, you can find it on the menu on the right of this page.) So if a game’s good I’m going to love it more than it deserves and, conversely, hate it more that it deserves if it’s bad. So “game of the year” might be a bit strong if you’re not thrilled by the idea of finally, really being Batman. But, really, if you’re not thrilled by that, we have nothing to discuss. Move along.