Batman Returns

It is my intention to always beat a game (and that means to the ending, though, sometimes I can't find every secret) before I review it. And even though I did eventually beat it, Batman Returns almost wasn't reviewed ... if you catch my drift.

What we have is not a game, it's not even a story. What we have is a pure, concentrated ball of frusteration. It's not frustration like Myst fans know frustration, it's frustration like no other. First and foremost, it is nearly impossible to play, with the stiff control and all. Plus, while there are several weapons to choose from (including, wait for it, Baterang), none are extremely effective. Not to say that your "default" attack is effective, but for what it's worth, simply jumping over the enemies saves you damage, and it's easier.

The characters are extremely tall, which also is one of it's faults. They are so big that it's even more obvious that there are only a couple frames of animation. Plus, the detail looks a bit strange, and everything feels stretched. If they had made the characters about 25% smaller it would have been much more entertaining. You also take an extreme amount of damage from enemies (since there are usually a ton of them rushing you) ... on average you will take at least one hit per attacker. Oh, and you only get one life, too. So if you pass on, so to speak, deep in the game you will have to start at the beginning of the GAME.

To make all this even worse, they have given you nothing to look forward to. All of the backgrounds have been done before in countless other games on every system since to dawn of side scrolling games. Even the latter levels are just as uninteresting as the first levels. In fact, if they had taken the backgrounds completely out, I don't think anybody would have minded.

There is just nothing good about this game. In fact, at one point on the Lynx's life, Atari decided to pack Batman Returns with the system. It would have been a slightly better bargain not releasing the game at all.