A Competent Game, for Once

We’ve seen a lot of terrible superhero games across the decades, starting with the okay but only because it was on the Atari 2660 Superman ‘79 to the absolutely atrocious Batman Forever, with plenty in between. It’s bad enough that when I find a halfway okay game, one that doesn’t slap me in the face with its awfulness, that I can sit through and actually manage to play without hating every second of it, I find that I want to call it “good”. Oftentimes they aren’t good games, but a diamond in the rough is still better than the polished turds that so many video game companies were releasing year after year after year.

Konami did the Batman beat-em-up brawler best with Batman Returns on the NES and, so far, no one has managed to come anywhere close to that. Ubisoft takes their shot here, with Batman: Chaos in Gotham, a game based on the fourth season of Batman: The Animated Series, known more commonly as Batman: The New Adventures, and, well, they aren’t really able to come close to the sublime game Konami crafted. This is a more than competent title, but it doesn’t rank up high enough to truly be considered good. It’s passable, playable even, with just enough small flaws that keep it from being a game anyone would care about the second they set the cart down.

Released for the Game Boy Color in 2001, Batman: Chaos in Gotham follows Team Batman, specifically BatmanOne of the longest running, consistently in-print superheroes ever (matched only by Superman and Wonder Woman), Batman has been a force in entertainment for nearly as long as there's been an entertainment industry. It only makes sense, then that he is also the most regularly adapted, and consistently successful, superhero to grace the Silver Screen. and Batgirl, as they fight and drive their way through a series of stages. The villains of Gotham (Mr. Freeze, JokerOne of Batman's first villains, and certainly his more famous (and most popular), the Joker is the mirror of the Bat, all the insanity and darkness unleashed that the hero keeps bottled up and controlled. and Harley QuinnCreated to serve as "Joker's Girlfriend" as well as his primary minion for Batman: The Animated Series, Harley Quinn quickly grew to be one of the most popular characters of that show, eventually finding a solid life beyond the cartoon in comics, movies, and media., Ruby Rocket, and Poison Ivy) have escaped from Arkham and are up to something. For stage after stage the heroes take the villains down, thwarting one dastardly plan after another until coming face to face with the mastermind behind it all, Two-Face. It’s up to Batman and Batgirl to take them down and save the day lest the chaos in Gotham threaten to tear the city down.

Gameplay wise, this isn’t really anything new. The game plays a lot like Batman: The Animated Series on the Game Boy. In fact, I’d go so far as the say that if there hadn’t been a ton of games in between, and eight years as well, this would have felt like a direct sequel to that game. You take Batman (and, for one stage, Batgirl) through long, winding, maze-like stages, each themed for a specific villain, and you fight and climb their way to the final hideout. Then you engage in a boss fight there, battling the foe one on one until they give up and are defeated. And then off to the next stage to do it all again.

These long, maze-like stages are so tedious. As I’ve noted before, these kinds of stages exist because designers couldn’t really think of a cohesive, interesting theme for their stages, so, instead, they just make the players weave back and forth up and down towers, looking for an exit placed haphazardly somewhere on the stage. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of it, no real thought to how the stages are laid out or what they would mean in the context of the town, the characters, or the game. It’s just a random challenge to scale, over and over. I hate these kinds of stages.

With that said, Batman (and, for one stage, Batgirl) does control well. The movement is fluid and dynamic, especially for a GBC title, and the game never feels weird, slidy, or unwieldy. The same goes for the combat which isn’t deep (just some basic punches, sweeping kicks, and a bashing attack) but it is effective. It all works decently well around the limited controls of the GBC and it feels tight enough that I was never fighting the game, just the foes in front of me… if I felt like fighting them at all since most of the time they were easy enough to avoid.

That actually does highlight an issue, though: the game is incredibly short. If you go out of your way to fight every foe and collect every hidden power-up, you’ll finish this game in forty-five minutes or so. If you skip all you can skip, avoid as many enemies as possible, and just plow to the end, you could be done in thirty minutes or less. That’s a short play time, even for a Game Boy Color title, and it shows just how little meat there is on this game. Just a small handful of stages, many of which are over in a blisteringly short couple of minutes, and then on to the boss fights.

The boss fights, in contrast to the stages, really drag things out. In most case a boss will only have a limited window of time where you can hit them, and their invincibility frames are long enough that you can only get one hit in before they move into a pattern and you have to wait. Some of these wait times are hideously long (like the boss fight with Joker and Harley) so you end up spending more time in the boss fight, just waiting to be able to attack, than you did on the stage getting up to them. The balance of the game is way off.

That is clearest when you consider the fact that the game sells itself on having two playable heroes, but of the five big missions available, Batgirl only gets one. It’s the Poison Ivy mission, and technically it includes one of the game’s driving sections, with Babs driving up to a greenhouse on heer motorbike. Like most of the vehicle sections, that part of her mission is over before it even really gets going, and then it’s into bog-standard fighting and exploring of maze-like stages. I appreciated her inclusion in the game, I just wish she was given more than one stage to handle before it was back to Batman for the rest of the game.

All of the vehicle stages could do with a little more to do, and a little more clarity to their objectives. One stage sees Batman driving around a few city blocks, looking for Joker’s goons who are driving around, causing trouble. Then you just crash into them to take them out. He also gets to fly around on the bat-glider, going in and out of buildings, dodging beams and walls, but this section lasts barely a minute and then it’s already done. The Batgirl motorbike section is similar and it too ends too fast. The only interesting section is Batman on the glider, taking out Ruby Rocket, since this gives him a real goal to complete… except here he uses a gun to take her down and as we all know, Batman doesn’t use guns. Oops.

It’s not that there’s anything inherently wrong with what Ubisoft put together here, it’s just that it doesn’t quite come together in a balanced, cohesive whole. I’d have loved to see a little more care and thought put into the stages so that every one of them wasn’t, “climb up an impossibly tall warehouse, fight some goons, beat a boss.” I would have enjoyed more time playing as Batgirl, maybe with a choice to decide which hero I played as in each stage. I think the vehicle stages should be more fleshed out and more interesting. So much of this game has great ideas but not the best execution. It’s just not quite there.

Still, what is available is decent enough that I was able to complete the game and not hate the time I spent doing it. Was it great? No, but it was still better than so much else I’ve played that had the Batman name attached. So many companies have made awful, shitty games that finding one that’s playable is such a relief. No one is going to give Batman: Chaos in Gotham any awards except, maybe, a ribbon for “congrats, you didn’t totally suck.” I just don’t know if that’s enough, though.