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On the one hand, this is a perfectly serviceable Metroidvania style game with meaty Batman Arkham type combat and a story to follow on from the Arkham Origins game. On the other hand, it’s a 2D game that tries to fit into a 3D space, with the plane you’re on frequently changing and disorientating you, and a map that serves to confuse as much as direct.
Detective Mode returns, but is rarely sufficient to show where to go or what items are “suspicious” enough to blow up or hit with a batarang. No, you have to hold a “soft” button on the touch screen and scan the area for things. The entire game turned into move along a screen, scan the entire screen, repeat, with puzzles or fights taking a back seat.
Sometimes even scanning stuff isn’t enough. A rusty hatch is described as “may break off its hinges with enough force”. Which do you use? Your batclaw to pull it down? Your explosive gel to blow it off? No – your batarang. Obviously. Later, another similarly described hatch needs gel instead. Another time, the claw. Or a fan, which is “possible to stop with explosive”, only you actually need the second gel upgrade. It makes you wonder if you’re doing it wrong, or if you just don’t have the right tool yet.
Overall, though, it was fun. The actual game bits proper, and some of the boss fights, are excellent. The hacking sections and complicated level layouts were not. Oh, and the bit you have to do after beating the last of the three main foes? Meaning you have to run round pretty much the whole map again? That wasn’t great. Perhaps if a bit more time had been spent trimming the fat, even if it meant cutting the length of the (already pretty short) game down a bit, that may have helped. As it is, it was well worth the reduced entry fee, but with hindsight I’m glad I didn’t pay full price.
I was able to get hold of a free copy of this from someone, and felt a little guilty I hadn’t spent the feeble 89p or whatever it usually costs. Having played it, though, I’m not any more.
It isn’t a bad game at all, but it suffers from two problems: It’s too random, and it’s too short.
The idea is to tap on grey blocks, making all of them disappear, leaving a single red block balanced somewhere without it falling of the bottom of the screen. For the first few levels, it’s mostly puzzle based – remove the blocks in a specific order to make the red one fall as you need it to. After that though, there’s a clear idea of how you’re supposed to finish the level, but the sliding and falling and bouncing is too random. You can do almost the exact same sequence of taps several times in a row and get completely different outcomes. By the end, it just becomes luck or perseverance as to whether you win or not.
And the end comes far too quickly. There are only 30 levels, with each taking less than a minute to complete, even if you have to try multiple times. The game isn’t even long enough to allow you to review it on the eShop – you have to hit an hour’s play to do that! There’s zero replayability too, so little chance of me reaching an hour. How hard could it have been to double or triple the number of levels?
New armour shader Thunder Devil now applied to my Titan which I received from completing a daily mission.
