Batman - The Telltale Series - Episode 1

So, I'm a little late in posting this. I finished episode one a few weeks ago. I really like the games from Telltale and I loved "The Wolf Among Us". So you put Telltale and Batman together and I'm already sold.

I remembered that I have a PC and I can sometimes play games on there. So I picked this game up on Steam.

There was some good and bad with this game. I'll start with the good.

The graphics were really good. This was in the same style as all the other Telltale games of late, but closest to "The Wolf Among Us". The voice acting was pretty good. The story is pretty good too. I liked the focus on the Bruce Wayne side of things. That makes this a little more intriguing. I like that this takes place during the early days of his career. You get to have a first encounter with Catwoman and Harvey Dent is still just Harvey Dent. Not Two-Face. You are dealing with street level criminals and I hope they stick with this instead of trying to go straight to the bigger names in the rogues gallery.

On the Batman side, I like what they do with the detective aspect of Batman as you investigate the various environments you are in. If I have a problem with the Batman bits, it's the combat. You're using the quicktime button presses, but they felt a lot more natural in "The Wolf Among Us". You have to do weird combinations here. From what I can tell, missing them also do not make as big an impact. I think having the use the mouse to throw the batarang at certain points doesn't work very well. It's all too clunky.

The worst part about this first episode is the performance. I realize my PC is now four years old and will not be the best at playing newer games. When I ran into the first couple of hiccups, I dropped down the resolution to low, just to see if that helps. It did for a little bit, but then the performance would hitch up again. So during cutscenes, the audio would keep going but the screen would move at about two frames per a second. Sometimes I would even exit and come back in. It was extremely bad and killed some of the fun I was having. Never before have I seen performance issues such as this. I hope they fix this problem before the next episode. I guess that is what I get for playing it day and date.

All in all, it was a good first episode, performance aside. I look forward to the rest of the story and would recommend this to anyone that's a Batman fan.