Batman Forever Review by: Toad 004 - 1.3/10
Batman: ForNever!I'm sure you've heard the Angry Video Game Nerd
talk swear about this game. And the truth is, it's games like this that create people like him. This game is based on the movie (uh-oh) of the same name. And while the Batman Forever movie is fun and entertaining, this game is nothing of the sort.
First of all, there are load times. Note this is an SNES game, with a cartridge - there simply shouldn't be load times, period. I believe this game was so lazily ported from the PC version (I honestly don't know if the PC version is any better or not) that they left in the "Hold On" screens rather than remove them from the code. The developers must have "copy pasted" the code - there is no other reason to not even think of removing that screen.
The game's levels seem to be set for a side scrolling fighter (like Double Dragon or Streets of Rage) but the battle system is more set up for a tournament fighter (Like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat). This means every enemy you face takes [Batman] forever to die. They aren't actually challenging once you have a pattern down for each enemy, but the fact that every foe you face takes 3 or more of your strongest attacks just to go down wears on your nerves very quickly.
You would believe that progressing though the game would be a simple left to right movement to the end of the level, but it does not work that way. You are required to save random people placed through the level before you can advance. Sometimes they are on the main path, but other times they are placed on higher or lower floors - and you might not even know that the higher or lower floors exist. The graphics on the first few areas show holes in the ceiling or floor to indicate that you can jump up or down to another floor, but these aren't in the rest of the game. And when you DO know that there is a floor above or below, you still don't know where the exact spot is that you're allowed to jump without this graphic. So you're forced to head aimlessly around the level trying to jump.
That is, if you can figure out how to jump up and down floors at all. The regular jump button is... up. That's a bad sign right there - if the jump button is up, you know the controls were poorly designed. But pressing up isn't enough - the jump isn't high enough. So you'll try all the other buttons, but AXBY (the SNES face buttons) only do punches and kicks. So you'll press all the buttons until you happen to press... select, which fires a grappling hook. Why select, rather than a button? But even that's not enough. You need to press select and up to fire the hook straight up and climb a floor. Well, that makes sense, but you don't press them at the same time, like you would in any other video game that has button combinations. You need to press select just before you press up. If you press up too soon, you'll jump instead.
Jumping down is even worse. Most people would try the 3 ways you can normally jump down in a video game:
- Press Down
- "Double Tap" Down
- Down + Jump
Trying either of the first two just makes Batman (or Robin) duck. And because the jump button is up, you can't press down and jump at the same time, due to the way d-pads are designed (using an emulator to press up and down at the same time in some games can glitch them out, since they were designed assuming you couldn't press them both at once). So how do you jump down? You press down and... R. Now, what does pressing R by itself do? Nothing. Outside of this one combination, pressing R does nothing at all. So why can't R by itself just be "jump down"? And just like jumping up, you need to press R,
then Down for it to work.
These controls were designed by the Riddler. No one else in the world would design a game and make the basic controls of the game so complicated. The "difficulty" of this game comes completely from the controls.
I have been informed that the genesis version of the game has far better controls. If you insist on playing this game, play the genesis version. But the SNES cart is so bad, that even other movie games are ashamed of it.
Graphics
4 Sound
1 Addictive
1 Depth
3 Story
2 Difficulty
10
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