Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Loren Halek

For the most part, Batman games have been stinkers since the early Sunsoft Genesis game came out around the same time as the 1989 movie by Tim Burton. I never had the pleasure (or is it displeasure) to play the recent ones like Batman: Dark Tomorrow (considered to be horrible) or Batman Vengeance (considered to be pretty good), so this is my first Batman experience on the new consoles.

This game is built around the animated series, which is one of my favorite of all time. Artist Jim Lee was brought in to create a new major Batman enemy, Sin Tzu, just for this game. UbiSoft has created a Streets of Rage-like game, but is it good or not? Let's see.

One thing I can say about this game is that the graphics and touches are top notch. Each hero you can choose (Batman, Robin, Batgirl and Nightwing) have the same moves, but they are each animated differently and some characters are faster while some are more powerful, so we're lucky that UbiSoft didn't just use the same animations for each of the 4 characters.

The coolest thing in the game are the little touches. Let's take the dock level for instance. It's pretty foggy down by Dock 47 where your character goes to investigate. As the character walks through the fog on the ground the fog pushes to the outside and you can see the path your character has traveled. Lighting is well done and the explosions are just excellent.

The levels themselves are laid out well, although you take a decidedly linear path no matter what. The levels are well animated and well stocked with graphical assets. You can slam enemies into the environment and you will break the item apart or dent it pretty well. Just nice graphical touches.

The enemies are even well animated, although there are serious clone issues in this game. This game throws the same enemy over and over at you, although the look of them change from level to level. The boss animations are well done, although I wasn't too excited about the first battle with the Scarecrow. Overall this is a nice graphical package that does a good job of presenting the animated series in a 3D environment.

Let's start with the music. It is very upbeat and it just fits in with the action. The standard Batman: The Animated Series theme is here again and I still consider it one of the best themes around for an animated series (scored by Danny Elfman). The music repeats itself, but it isn't really noticeable because I personally liked the tunes and never wanted to turn it off.

As for the voices...wow! They pulled all the actors from the animated series to do the voices. The cool thing about this is depending on what hero you pick the cutscenes are all different in how the hero handles the situation. It's great to hear the same boss voices as well, although unfortunately the major Batman villians are not here like Joker, Penguin, Riddler, etc. Overall the sound is top notch.

This game is easy to control. X for punch, A for kick, Y for jump, B to grab, black to throw item (like Batarang), etc. You will be using the X and A button a heck of a lot in the game. As you finish your levels you get points that you can put toward new moves. Each move is shown and the buttom presses are shown as well, so you should have no trouble pulling off moves. The problem is that the new moves are for the most part not as powerful as your basic three-hit punches and kicks.

The big problem with the control is that the heroes don't have much for defensive moves. You can hit the L trigger to block, but it doesn't do the best of jobs. Your best defense is the rush move with the R trigger. You can get out of some tight situations with that and it helps a lot, but be ready to be surrounded by enemies and using punch and kick a lot.

This is a hard section to judge. This game is a lot of fun, but it is horribly repetitive and as stated in the control section, the new moves are totally useless and take more time to go through the animation process than the regular (and powerful) punches and kicks. This means you might as well spend credits on unlocking some of the extras instead of using them to purchase moves (except for the upgrades on the Batarang, those are actually useful). Another big problem is that for the majority of the levels you are either saving civilians or defusing bombs. Now this is all well and good, but when you do it over and over on each sub-level it gets kind of tiring. Why even have these in there when you could just plow through the enemies like you're supposed to do?

Arkham Asylum and Blackgate Prison have both had explosions and some of Batman's Rogues Gallery are on the loose (Scarecrow, Clayface and Bane), but Batman knows that someone else is behind all of this and we find out it is Sin Tzu. Sin Tzu is an Asian warmonger who has come over to America and set camp in Arkham Asylum to take on Batman. Sin Tzu wrote his book on the art of war (similarity with Sun Tzu's actual book called Art of War...just change one letter and you have Sin Tzu). It is a way to introduce a brand new major villian in the Batman storyline, but I feel it falls a bit flat.

Batman is my favorite hero on the DC side of things. I have followed him through comics, the movies, the animated series, etc. and keep a pretty good tab on what is going on in his universe even to this day. Why create Sin Tzu, now someone who DC can inject into the comic books right around the time when Hush has been introduced as a new Batman villian? Not only that, but why create Sin Tzu when you have Ra's Al Ghul floating around that you can use? I find striking similarities between the two villians as Sin Tzu tries to be Batman's intellectual equal here as he attempts to outsmart the heroes. I also have a problem with there being second-tier enemies in this game: Scarecrow, Clayface and Bane. Where are the heavies like Joker, Riddler, Mr. Freeze, etc.? Scarecrow is arguably a top-tier villian, but I'd rather see the bigger ones than him.

Other than those foundational problems I have with this new story and villian, I opened up this section saying the game is horribly repetitive, but quite fun. As you go through rescuing hostages or diffusing bombs you will be going through tons of enemies. There are 3 types of enemies: the normal thug, the range-weapon holding thug and the "more health and powerful" thug (with health bar included!). Each main level's baddies are dressed up and have powers akin to the Batman boss at the end of the level. For example, in Scarecrow's section the thugs will have gas that will make the hero hallucinate and think the enemies are something else. In Clayface's section you have enemies that are made of clay and that will throw balls of clay at you and clump on the ground. The problem with this is if you know the history of Batman you will know who the final boss of the area is by the thugs you are facing. Sometimes you will know just off of each section's title screen (which looks a lot like the title screens from the animated series...very top notch quality), but it would be cool to be somewhat surprised on your first time through the game to find out halfway into the level in a cutscene that it is indeed Clayface you will be facing, you know?

This game is also a fun multiplayer game, but it is still repetitive. It would have been cool to have a 4-player option so all the heroes could be used at once. I think it would make quite the party game. I really think if UbiSoft had made the enemies a little more varied and made the upgraded moves more powerful and faster to pull off this game would have been so much better. As it stands you may only play through it once, but you will be doing it only to see the cutscenes and to fight the bosses. Getting to them is a chore in extreme boredom. If you want to unlock things like art, models and stuff you have to buy tokens in order to purchase them from the trophy room. Problem is you may not want to play through the game again with a different character other than to see the different cutscenes, so you may not unlock everything.

Overall this is a good game, it is just boring.

This game took me about 6 hours to beat, but you do have the option of playing through the game again with another character or on another of the 3 difficulty levels. You will probably not want to play through the game again though, unless you really want to see every character's cutscenes (they are different depending on which hero you pick) or you want to unlock everything. The problem with going through it again is that you have to go through the tiring wave of enemies again. This game is a great rental because it has high production value, but it is no Streets of Rage for example in terms of straight arcade beat-em-up games.Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu is a good game with high production value, but it is just too repetitive and boring as you go through wave upon wave of the same enemies using the same punches and kicks every time. The cutscene storyline, voices, bosses and graphic work help this game rise above total mediocrity. If you're not a Batman fan at all or don't know a lot about the main characters, you might just want to leave this game on the shelf. It's a lot like The Bouncer in that it is a well done game, but the gameplay in itself is boring and repetitive. It's just so sad though, because UbiSoft has something special here...they just need to rethink whether to do another straight beat-em-up game or not. Rent this game and grab a friend, if you like it the game is at the low price of $19.99. Yep, it's dropped from its original price of $39.99.

Gaming Trend Score

74

1. Graphics: 91
2. Audio: 90
3. Controls: 85
4. Gameplay: 65
5. Value/Replay: 50
6. OVERALL:74