I’ve always admired Telltale games as they were and are a very interesting blend of dialogue choices and QTE driven events. They’re not for everyone but for those that enjoy them they are always a bar for quality. Given my love for the Batman character and world I was overjoyed to see a Batman game in this genre. With the exception of one part it met my expectations and then some. The story and characters are fantastic. The game did a great job of taking established characters and finding new ways to use them or tweak their back stories and make them feel fresh. Messing with established canon could have been what sunk this game if done wrong but I can’t think of a part I would criticize or didn’t enjoy. Penguin; Vicky Vale; Selina Kyle; Harvey Dent; Gordon; the list goes on; I enjoyed how they were all presented. I also loved how this batman could be played as just a tad more brutal than some interpretations. Between roughing up suspects and the fights themselves being more brutal than in some previous Batman games I was happy with the style. I especially liked how in some larger fights you could plan out your attack by linking objects to people so you had some freedom of choice in the fights although sometimes it was more linear. The voice acting was fantastic across the board. The graphics style was mostly what you would expect from Telltale. It had a good style and use of colours but I wills say the hair detail on some characters was poor as was some injury details. For instance in one scene Bruce is applying bandages to his shoulder after a fight and they are coming off bloody but his body itself had no blood. Clothing and water detail were especially good and stood out. The puzzles with the exception of a couple were great. You had to link items to get a full picture of what happened at the scene. A couple times the objects linked made no sense to me but it was trial and error and the majority of them could be solved by logic. One other thing I will mention is that you are going to want to use a Telltale account while playing. I learned the hard way that in future Telltale Batman games you can’t simply import your save game file that it has to be done using cloud saves or by manually saying which choices you picked in this game. I hadn’t remembered my choices from years ago so that’s why I replayed this now. The controls were decent although having combos of “Shift + Q/E” at times were annoying.
I played Batman: A Telltale Series on Linux using Wine. The game never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any bugs. What I did notice however was some of the worst optimization I have ever encountered. At times the game would drop to 0 FPS and there was a near constant state of sluggish, jittery moments. Even when the frame rate was well above 60 it could feel that way. Furthermore this wasn’t a Wine issue as when I first bought this game years ago I encountered the same problems on Windows. This also means that, in the over four years since release, this issue was never solved or patched by the developers which is shameful. The game also uses way more system resources than something of it’s visual quality should. Previous Telltale games didn’t have this issue so I’m not sure why Batman does. There are 3 AO settings; an AA toggle and 2 other graphics options to adjust. You can pause the game at any time but can’t skip cut scenes. Alt-Tab doesn’t work. The Telltale account for cloud saves worked just fine in Wine on Linux.
Graphics Engine: Telltale Tool version 27
Game Version Played: 1.0.0.1
Input Used: Keyboard and Mouse
Disk Space Used: 13.8 GB
Settings Used: All High; DOF Off; AA On; 1080P
GPU Usage: 0-100 %
VRAM Usage: 1489-3857 MB
CPU Usage: 6-34 %
RAM Usage: 2.5-3.4 GB
Frame Rate: 2-144 FPS
Outside of the terrible optimization this was a fantastic game. My gut wants to give it a low score because of how it ran but it was too damn good and fun to do that. If you enjoy Telltale games or the Batman series this should have something for you. I finished all five episodes in 7 hours and 37 minutes which felt like a good length.
My Score: 9/10
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