Batman: The Telltale Series was announced during the 2015 Game Awards with an intriguing teaser trailer. The first episode of Telltale’s next epic story was released on multiple platforms in August 2016. The story focuses more on Bruce Wayne and his backstory with Gotham, his family, and the caped vigilante.
The game follows the ever-growing popular style of adventure games set by previous titles in Telltale’s history of releases. The gameplay consists of critical dialog choices in order to progress your own individual story with different branching paths determined by how you react to situations. The first episode doesn’t hold many puzzles for you to figure out leaving you with the opportunity to fully focuses on exploration and conversations between characters. It wouldn’t be a Batman game without some form of bad ass fighting scenes, though; we see the return of a QTE system found throughout Telltale’s games, but with an added twist of having to carry out combos during the scenes too, which really keeps you on your toes throughout the action. Much like in the Arkham series of games, the ‘detective mode’ also makes an appearance where you have to solve and figure out crime scenes. Obviously, the bread and butter of this game come from the plot and decisions you make and Telltale have really pulled off an interesting and captivating start for this series.
The visual aspect of Batman is again mimicking the rest of the Telltale series with a gorgeous cell shaded comic book style. Facial expressions and character animations are all on point with the top of the range voice acting to be heard from the whole cast.
There is no difficulty in completing the first episode in this series; the QTEs can easily be repeated if you mess up, and the small amount of puzzles you encounter are easily solved with a little thought. I really like that a lot of the key choices you have to make come with a timer on, meaning you normally have to go with your gut instinct response rather than sitting on your hands for a few minutes whilst you mull over your decision.
Throughout the first episode, there is a small chance to explore a number of scenes, but none of them really allow you too much space to find new areas. There are a number of objects that Batman/Bruce can interact with, but sadly these are few and far between, hopefully, the episodes to follow will allow a much greater chance to explore some iconic scenes such as Wayne Manor or The Bat Cave. This first episode took me just over two hours to complete which is the usual length for a Telltale episode, so the full series will easily be a ten to twelve-hour experience if that is anything to go by.
Episode one is a great start for this new Telltale series, the story is gripping and interesting to any fans of the caped crusader. You’ll get to relive some of the iconic moments in the Batman story as well as create some new ones. I for one cannot wait to see where the rest of the series goes.
BATMAN: THE TELLTALE SERIES - Episode 1
$24.99
Pros
- Story
- Choices that matter
- Voice acting
Cons
- Lack of exploration
- Few puzzles