The summer is here and along with it comes the wave of big budget movies and the more often than not, the awful games that they spawn. It’s no secret in the gaming world that games based on movies are almost always guaranteed to be nothing short of quick romp through the hastily developed, bug filled mirror version of the movie. Batman Begins is thankfully above most of the average movie games out there, but that’s not to say it is a non-stop thrill ride through the mean streets of Gotham. As the game follows the same story line of the movie, be prepared for major spoilers if you haven’t seen the big screen version and if you have, then the storyline will be pretty familiar and not so stimulating to you. The game starts with your training in the Himalayas where the League of Shadows educates you in the ways of instilling fear into your enemies. As the game progresses and you return to Gotham, you find out about drug shipments coming into the city and learn that it is not all that it seems. A doctor, Jonathan Crane has been using the drugs for experiments in the ever famous Arkham Asylum on patients and plans on releasing the fear inducing drug city wide. The game follows your path to take down Crane, who is better known as The Scarecrow, and put a stop to his plans while at the same time, fighting of the demons from your past, mentally and physically.

Flat out, Batman Begins is a sharp looking game. The movement animations are smooth and fluid, whether you are beating the stuffing out of one of Falcone’s henchmen or grappling and swinging from object to object high above their heads. The atmosphere works well for the most part, although the game over all seems to be pretty bright most of the time for a game centered on a character that uses shadows and darkness to his advantage. There are many cutscenes that take place to move the story along or are triggered when you cause a calamity and the facial and body expressions of the characters play well with the event. Fire effects and explosions are equally impressive as are the environments that you find yourself in. As well there was no frame rate loss or slow downs at all during the entire run of the game.

Although Batman is a good looking game, the gameplay takes a toll on you after a short while. Fighting each enemy becomes a chore in itself. You simply punch and kick until an icon appears for you to finish off the enemy, or grab him and then you will have the option to interrogate him, which usually takes two or three times until he spills the beans. You can pick up little tricks such as flash bangs and smoke grenades to use while fighting, but only when you are fighting and not before. As you move through each mission, there will be indicators that appear around the area that show you objects that can be interacted with. These range from doors to open, which you can also use an optic cable ala Sam Fisher to peer under and see the action on the other side, and other environmental objects, like windows, grates or cables that can be destroyed by punching or tossing your trusty batarang at.

As well there are grapple points, where as soon as you are close enough to reach it, a button icon will appear and tell you to grapple to the spot. When you see these indicators appear, you know that you need to use it in some way and it really makes feels like you are moving through the game going from one indicator to the next and following a simple path from beginning to end. There is also more than a few times in the game where your game will end instantly if you are spotted by enemies with weapons before you have found out the series of events needed to scare them into unarming themselves. Why the enemies decide to drop their guns when they get scared is beyond me, but they all do it. These fear events that you need to pull off to scare enemies usually involves blowing something up or making an object collapse near them. When you do this to them, they get rattled and freak out and you are able to attack them without worry of an instant death. When you move from one area to the next, following the bread crumb trail of interactable objects, only to come to a stop because you need to scare enemies, the gameplay does get tedious and repetitive quickly.

To break up the monotonous theme of scaring enemies over and over, there are two missions that involve you driving the Batmobile through the streets of Gotham. The Batmobile missions essentially require you to follow blue arrows, much like midnight club and many other racing games, as you race through the streets avoiding enemy and police vehicles. You have the ability to jump, which is pretty useless, as well as the ability to fire rockets, but only when you are allowed to do so by the onscreen messages. When you take out other cars in the traffic, the effect is a slow motion, step by step visual of seeing the car crash which is a pretty nice feature, but like most features of the driving missions, pointless.

Additional features of the game include cut scenes from the movie that are played between missions, alternate batsuits, such as the good old blue, grey and yellow suit, cast interviews, a gallery of fear where you can learn about the enemies and a bonus batmobile mini-game. Although these are unlockables when you complete the game, they are a nice addition to check out when you have played all the way through. Batman Begins is a rather short game, pulling in at about 6-7 hours to complete, the repetitiveness and the arduousness of the gameplay and fighting style, makes it seem much longer, although, admittedly, it is one of the better Batman games to be released in some time. If you are one of the few that haven’t seen the movie yet and are looking for a game to kill sometime with, then Batman Begins would be a good choice.