There are no complex patrol routines to figure out. It's just: player enters room, player surveys room for bad guys or items lit up by icons, player immediately figures out what to do, player does it, player moves onto next room. There's no freeform Gotham to explore, full of potential and a complex criminal element. The problem is that the game only lets you do these things when it wants.

Taking out a stanchion holding up a pile of explosive barrels, uncorking some vents that send enemies hurtling across the room, grabbing a bad guy from above and killing him quietly so that his chums don't even realise he's gone until they turn around. You do this by causing inexplicable mayhem and then leaping up to deliver a terrifying and violent finale - usually by pressing B when prompted. Then the other guards without guns run up and he fights and kills them.īut you can also strike fear into your enemies, forcing then to drop their weapons. Having used the radar in the bottom left to identify which guard is the gun-carrying danger-man, Batman can sneak up behind him and press B to do him in. As you move Batman around one of the game's third-person action levels, you can click in the left thumb-stick to enter sneaking mode, which sees Batman stalking along in a hunched manner worryingly close to Star Wars Episode III's General Grievous. The game, however, only begins to explore it. Obviously this is an intriguing premise, and word has it that the film does a very good job of exploring it. The over-arching idea is that Batman's job is to strike fear into the hearts of villains by building up a myth, a terrifying icon - a kind of Kaiser Soze of Gotham City. Īlso because it's a game that takes up quite a few ideas - 3D platforming, third-person fisticuffs, really simple logic-based gadget puzzles, stealth killing, driving and the like - all of which are the beginnings of an interesting game, but never really evolve into anything. Because, you know, it's a game of that film.

Batman begins ps2