Review: Telltale’s Batman Episode 4: Guardian Of Gotham
Bruce Wayne meets “Jon Doe” and Gotham is under martial law in episode 4 of Telltale’s Batman: “Guardian Of Gotham”
Whelp, here we are again. Another episode of Telltale’s Batman game where the choices don’t matter and nothing makes sense. After episode 3 the plot broke some but I had hope that the well-done twist at the end would go somewhere. I don’t want to get too into plot specifics, but this latest episode of Batman goes off the rails in some ridiculous ways.
The first might be the appearance of The Joker. He’s not the Joker yet though, he’s just some guy who nobody knows the name of and he won’t tell anyone, so he goes by “Jon Doe”. He still has that trademark green hair and white skin tone though.
The game starts off with you in Arkham Asylum after being injected with the drug that makes everyone behave exactly as the plot demands even though it’s just supposed to make them unpredictably psychotic and paranoid. Not every version of the Joker is great, but this is easily the worst one. He’s not scary or funny, he’s pretty much just an unruly dude in Arkham who is definitely inserted for a future season of this game series. I really do not look forward to having to deal with a whole season fighting this guy unless they really improve the writing. And this is pretty much like a Wolverine cameo in the latest X-Men film, it serves no real purpose and just wastes a good 20 minutes of your time.
It gets worse with the mayor of Gotham, Harvey Dent aka Two-Face doing things that should get him immediately arrested, but Gordon throws up his hands and has no idea what to do. And Oswald Cobblepot is pretty much the same. Most of this episode I was rolling my eyes at how ludicrous everything was.
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The best thing I can say about episode 4 of Telltale’s Batman is that this episode seems a little smoother performance-wise than previous ones. I didn’t really notice any frame-rate drops and there seemed to be just one big missed sound cue. But for games like this, story is key and the story, which was pretty middling to begin with, has gone completely off the rails. I’m kind of morbidly fascinated to see where the finale goes in episode 5…