Batman: The Enemy Within fixed a few things I didn’t like about Batman: A Telltale Series but it also introduced a few other issues. Overall I actually enjoyed the story even more than the original which is saying something as I loved the first one. I thought once again that Tell Tale did a great job of making the characters their own and not always sticking to canon but doing it well. I thought they handled having so many of the villains in the same story pretty well. It could have easily gotten muddled or not given enough time to one or the other but it felt balanced. I give them a lot of credit for being willing to kill off established characters, it added a sense of unpredictability I enjoyed. I really enjoyed what they did with Joker’s character although I would have liked more involvement from Catwoman near the end. One new mechanic introduced was sometimes you have to hold down the left mouse button and move it in a direction such as up to perform a task. I disliked this because I felt it often wouldn’t properly track the movement and made me redo it many times. Mechanics that got scrapped were planning out complex fights by linking objects as well as detective work at crime scenes both of which I felt could have and should have been kept. Puzzles were overall good with the exception of a safe puzzle early on. Another issue I had with the original that got fixed was injury detail. This time injuries you receive were properly on Batman’s body from scene to scene. Sadly one new issue was the import save feature. The game wouldn’t pick up my choices from my cloud save of the original so I had to manually pick what my previous choices were. This could have easily been a non issue had Tell Tale allowed me to point to a save game file on my computer. I also took issue with the wording on two choices. I ended up having to redo the entire chapters because the wording of the choices was very different to what I thought they meant and I was not allowed to just go back to a couple checkpoints previous.
I played Batman: The Enemy Within on Linux using Wine. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any glitches or bugs. The terrible performance of the original was better in this game but still had the odd drops in frame rate now and again. System resource usage was noticeably lower than the original. Alt-Tab still didn’t work. There were still 3 AO settings; a DOF toggle; an AA toggle; and 2 other graphics options. The game still uses an auto save system. One major issue I had with it was that if you wanted to go back to make a different choice you had to restart the entire episode. It would have been nice if you could have loaded a previous auto save but there was only one save slot so it was always overwritten.
Graphics Engine: Telltale Tool version 27
Game Version Played: 1.0.0.1
Save System: Auto (1 save slot)
Input Used: Keyboard and Mouse
Disk Space Used: 24.8 GB
Settings Used: All High; DOF Off; AA On; 1080P
GPU Usage: 0-100 %
VRAM Usage: 1723-3165 MB
CPU Usage: 6-25 %
RAM Usage: 2.3-2.8 GB
Frame Rate: 20-144 FPS
Overall while I enjoyed the story and character development even more than the original, Enemy Within managed to introduce mechanics I didn’t like; scrap ones I did; botch the import of my previous save game; and irritate me with their save system. It did run better though and as still highly enjoyable. If you enjoyed previous Tell Tale games you should enjoy this as well.
My Score: 8.5/10
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 21.0.3 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB | Manjaro 21.0.5 | Mate 1.24.1 | Kernel 5.12.2-1-MANJARO | AOC G2460P 1920*1080 @ 144hz | Wine 6.8 | DXVK 1.7.3L-03f11ba