Batman Forever: The Arcade Game
PlayStation
Nostalgia Factor:
I was a huge Batman Forever fan when I was a kid – both of the movie and the video game for the Sega Genesis. Yeah yeah, I know the game is crap but back then I liked it! Despite being such a huge fan, I never knew that an arcade version of Batman Forever existed. Until now: the year 2021. How in the world did 25 years pass before I even learned of this game’s existence?
As soon as I heard of this game and saw some screenshots for it, I knew I had to play it. And wouldn’t you know it, my brand-new RetroPie made it super easy to play the PS1 port. I kind of… wish I hadn’t wasted my time with it, though. Truly one of the worst games I’ve played in recent memory.
Keep reading for my full thoughts.
Story:
This game loosely follows the plot of the movie Batman Forever. There are a ton of things about this game that don’t make sense, like how Robin could be in the first stage fighting against Two-Face during the bank robbery when in the movie Robin didn’t even exist yet. But when you play games like this, you have to ignore that kind of thing. And luckily the shittiness of the game made that a very easy thing to do.
Gameplay:
I wasn’t expecting much from this game. All I was hoping for was a Final Fight-esque beat ‘em up but with a Batman Forever skin. I would say that that is what I got, but this game does not hold a candle to Final Fight, TMNT, or really any other beat ‘em up titles out there. And I should know, I’ve played and reviewed a ton of them lately! In fact, I’d say this game makes Ninja Gaiden and Hook like absolute masterpieces.
Why is it so bad? I say this in almost every review and I’ll say it again: the fun factor. I don’t care how a game looks or sounds or how intuitive it is, if it isn’t any fun to play then what’s the point? And that’s how I felt here. There was almost no point in me playing this game. Right off the bat (pun intended), I could tell I wasn’t going to have any fun here. First off, the game looks like a mess (but we’ll get to the graphics later). Second, the controls and hit detection are a mess. And third, the difficulty, even on the game’s lowest setting, is absolutely off the charts.
The first time I played this game, I took my standard approach of playing using the default settings. Three lives, three continues, game over. Normally, I’d say about 99% of the time I am fine playing on the default setting. The only time I ever give myself more lives is if I am playing Sunset Riders. The only time I lower the difficulty is if I’m playing a Super Star Wars game. I had to do both here. Seriously. I had to play this game on easy in order to beat it – and even then, USING SAVE STATES, I could still barely, BARELY finish the game. It is so hard.
What makes the game so hard? It’s cheap. No way around it. In a standard beat ‘em up, enemy attacks chip away at your health meter. Occasionally you’ll encounter an enemy who packs a harder wallop, or maybe you’ll get stuck in a corner and have a difficult time getting out of the swarm of enemies around you. But for the most part, those games are pretty fair with their difficulty. Not Batman Forever. You can go from having a full health bar to dead in literally one second if an enemy starts railing on you with their fists. I am not kidding. The first time this happened to me, I thought it was just a fluke and it wouldn’t happen again. But then it did. Oh boy, it did. It’s basically unavoidable, too, which makes it even worse.
The first time playing this game I made it to about the 3rd level or so before I had burned through all my continues. That was it. Game over. I waited a day and then came back to the game, upping the number of continues to maximum and using save states to minimize all the cheap deaths. Even then, I barely made it halfway through the game before I had exhausted all of my resources. How the frick was I supposed to beat this game?
This is when I turned the difficulty down to easy. It was a shameful thing, but I had to do it. But like I said, even with the low difficulty, even with max continues, even with save states, I still was barely able to beat the game. I am not sure if I ever would have been able to beat it without “cheating” and honestly I am not tempted to come back and see.
Even putting aside this game’s difficulty, it is still a complete mess. You can punch, kick, and jump. As far as I know, there is no way to block. Your attacks are limited and often miss your enemies for no reason whatsoever, even when you’re perfectly lined up with them. In order to beat this game, I had to resort to the cheap trick of jump kicking everyone and then bum rushing them as soon as they stood up to knock them back down again. Even playing like this, I still was constantly getting surrounded by enemies and I was still going from full health to dead in a matter of seconds.
The game does give you a lot of power ups, but I’m still to this day not quite sure how they work. The easy ones to figure out are the projectile based items, which you fire using the punch button. There are a few other power ups too, such as “VR Mode” that freezes your enemies and then shatters them when you punch them (what’s that about not killing people, Bats?) as well as a grapple attack that sends you flying around the screen, taking out all enemies in sight. But the other power ups, like the little Batman icons? I have no idea what they do. There’s a bar on your screen for power, underneath your health meter, which these icons fill up. But when the meter fills up, nothing happens. Every once in a while your character will levitate into the sky and start shooting crazy lightning at everyone, which is a cool screen clearing attack, but I never had any idea what would trigger those attacks. It seemed to happen when I had a full power meter and I’d collect a Batman icon – but only randomly, like once or twice a stage.
Sigh. All of this added up to me having absolutely no fun with this game. At all.
Graphics:
I mentioned before that this game looks like a mess, and for the most part that’s pretty true. Bad, digitized characters. Blocky pixels everywhere. WAY too much stuff happening on the screen. But I do have to give it at least some sort of credit for faithfully recreating a lot of the environments from the movie. The gala event and the graffiti filled neon streets were two of my favorite locations in this game. The game’s introduction with the Batmobile is pretty cool too. I always loved the Batman Forever Batmobile. The character select screen looks nice as well.
I guess I’m grasping at straws, here.
Sound:
This is probably the best part of the whole game, as sad as that is. They actually use the Batman Forever theme song, unlike the Genesis version of the game. The stage music is catchy. There’s some voice acting from the movie. “Let’s start this party with a bang!” is always a good Batman Forever quote to include in a game. And I like the voice of the game’s “commentator” even though I can’t understand what he’s saying half the time. There’s just something super terrific about the way he says “super grapple” that I absolutely adore.
Overall:
I think I’ve made my thoughts on this game pretty clear. It sucks, and for a multitude of reasons. Maybe it is better playing with two players, but I can’t imagine it. Instead of just making one person miserable, the game would now make two people miserable.
I likely won’t ever return to this game again, and I can’t recommend it to anyone else in good faith. It took me several attempts to beat this game, tallying at least three or four hours. And I had to write this review, which sucked up even more of my time. Time I can’t get back, no matter what.
Piss off, Batman Forever: The Arcade Game. You’re a giant waste of my time.
Final Score:
F
If you liked this review, check out some of my other game reviews:
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