"Batman: The Enemy Within" Bat-Review - I'm Bat-Meh!

For whatever reason, my bat-review of the first season of Telltale Games' Batman series is my second most-read review on this blog (just below Mass Effect: Andromeda), so I guess folks really want to know about how Telltale handles such a beloved superhero. Well, I've recently finished the finale of Batman: The Enemy Within (the second season), and I'm ready to share my thoughts. If you read my review of the original season, you may recall that I adored the first few episodes and thought the last two were lame. Three good episodes in the front and two lame ones in the back. With The Enemy Within, however, it's less like a bar chart and more like an upward-opening parabola: high up at the beginning and end but lagging in the middle. And this time around, only the beginning and ending episodes stood out. Yes, unfortunately The Enemy Within is pretty weak save for one or two aspects. Well...let's bat-get to it. I'll be handling this review the same way that I handle other Telltale reviews: singling out one or two things I'd like to talk about, but handling content more or less on a episode-by-episode basis. This is going to be an...uncharacteristically short review, and you'll bat-understand why in a little bit.

Firstly, I'd like to remind you, dear reader, that in the original season, Telltale strove to have a consistent 60 fps framerate, but only succeeded part of the time, and with several technical issues to boot. This time around, however, Telltale decided to cut back down to 30 fps to avoid the issues faced by season 1...but *throws hands up and laughs* it isn't any less technically sloppy. Thankfully I didn't experience any hard crashes this time around, but the framerate got progressively sloppier as the season progressed. By the time I got to the finale, lighting was terrible and all the action was choppy. None of these things are particularly new in the Telltale canon, but come the bat-hell on! This happens literally every time with Telltale! It isn't acceptable anymore now that Telltale has achieved massive success! I know that they probably don't read my stuff, nor do they probably give two guanos (get it?) about what I score their games, but I'm just going to have to continue taking off a full point for technical problems every time I don't see improvement. Seriously, Telltale, get your bat-act together!

To start off my discussion of the last thing I need to talk about before going into specific episodes, I'd like to tell y'all about an experience that some of my old bat-college friends had not too long after we graduated. They were out on the town one day and they came across a man who was giving out slips of paper with his phone number on them to every bi-x-chromosome-d human being he came across. This man, evidently just a bat-tad bit bat-older (...sorry) than us, then approached the one woman in this college friend ensemble and started to hand over one of those slips of paper, only to be verbally stopped. The group questioned him, and he said, "You'd be surprised how often this works!" He evidently maintained that position as if his manhood depended on it. Now, what does this cringey scenario have to do with Batman: The Enemy Within? Well, my point here is to liken the introductory message on each episode reading "This game is tailored by the choices you make" to this sad little man saying "You'd be surprised how often this works!" If anyone believed it before, they don't now, and the assertion just kind of seems pathetic. I'll talk about this a little more in the section on the finale, but once again, your choices don't really seem to make a difference. I can think of a number of choices off the top of my head that never had any impact on the story in spite of being played up as a huge moral conundrum. No matter who I pissed off, no matter who I chose to save, everything just went as planned by Telltale. The only times that I felt that my choices had weight was at the end of episode 4 and the beginning of the finale. The story breaks off into one of a few completely different angles at that point, but to the best of my knowledge, everything ends up converging into ultimately the same ending no matter what. Like the technical sloppiness, this is hardly surprising news, but it's still something that the game suffers because of.

Alright, now let's start from Episode 1. Batman: The Enemy Within starts up in Batman's stomping ground of Gotham City, where a criminal named "The Riddler," who was prominent in the days of Thomas and Martha Wayne, has returned to start a new wave of quizzical terror. So notorious is the Riddler's reputation that "The Agency," led by the equally notorious Amanda Waller, makes its way into Gotham to try and bring him in. From there, Batman must once again decide whether to be a gentle or firm hand of justice. This opening episode is pretty strong. There's a clear villain and a self-contained plot that allows the game to easily transition into the rest of the story while still feeling complete as an episode. This episode also re-introduces John Doe, who is easily the season's strongest aspect. For those who didn't play the original season, John Doe is the Joker, though he hasn't taken that name yet. Long story short, John helped Bruce Wayne escape Arkham Asylum, and now he believes that they're best friends. Anyone who has made the unfortunate mistake of talking to me about this season has heard me gush about this re-interpretation of the Joker. Anyone who I've gushed to has heard an earful about the funeral scene in this episode where John shows up uninvited with a "get well soon" card for Bruce because, even though he doesn't really know how to, he wants to cheer up his best friend. This re-interpretation of the Joker as a realistically mentally ill, childlike, and ultimately henpecked man with a good heart but an inescapable tendency towards violence is utterly fascinating, and as I stated, it continues to be this season's absolute strongest aspect. Anywho, John Doe shows up asking to cash in on the favor Bruce owes him from the previous season. Once Bruce learns that by agreeing to this favor, he can get an angle on the Riddler, we have the start of this season's plot. As I've made a point of saying, episode 1 is solid, and it had me psyched to play the rest. Unfortunately....

Now for the reason this review is relatively short...Episodes 2, 3, and 4 all kind of blend in together, and none of them have any particularly shocking turns of events or anything that makes them stand out until the end of episode 4. You'd think that a plotline in which Bruce Wayne has to play double agent with the likes of Harley Quinn, Mr. Freeze, and Bane might be somewhat compelling, but it's just completely stagnant. Normally I'd do a paragraph for each of these episodes, but I don't have anything to say about any of them because I've legitimately forgotten a lot of what went down. There were some choices that didn't matter, some talk of a biological weapon (because of bat-course there was), and John continued his slow evolution compellingly. These episodes pretty much hit all of the same points over and over again: Waller is mean and Gordon is nice, but he's letting personal feelings get in the way, Harley Quinn thinks there's a traitor among them and isn't necessarily ruling Bruce out, etc. It's just...meh...until the end of episode 4, where the plot breaks off into one of a few different directions. At that point, I was once again psyched to see what the finale had in store, and thankfully...

Episode 5 is easily the season's strongest episode, and it's one of Telltale's strongest episodes across its vast library. The start of the episode lets you truly feel the impact of some of your choices, and I (for once) was satisfied. Tensions are high the whole time, and I found myself legitimately wondering if I could have the story end a certain way. I tried my best to make that ending happen, but as it turns out, Telltale had other events in mind. Though the plot more or less ends up resolving the same way no matter what choices you make in this episode, it's still solid. This is the episode where all the game's major reveals happen and where John Doe's transition into the Joker is completed. Let me say this: I ended up on the "vigilante" path, and in that path, the moment in which John truly becomes the iconic villain is the single most satisfying character moment in Telltale's canon (I'm now convinced they chose his voice actor by having everybody who auditioned do nothing but laugh like a lunatic). It's here where Telltale basically shows that the entire point of the season was to show us in detail why that tried-and-true Batman philosophical point, "Batman creates the villains he faces," is true. That idea has been done to death in Batman stories, but this is the first time that I've actually seen something resembling a visual thesis on the topic, and once the credits started rolling, I found myself seriously pondering the idea. After the final face-off, we're left with one last choice to make. Chances are, if there's a third season, this choice will get thrown out the window along with the rest. As it stands now, however, it's a fitting choice to end on.

This has been a short and vague bat-review, but that's just what happens when I'm met with a product as pretty consistently uninspiring as Batman: The Enemy Within. The season basically has one arrow in its quiver: The character and transformation of John Doe. Because that single arrow is the entire point of the season, it's safe to say that Telltale accomplished exactly what it wanted to, but it came at the cost of the usual story and character strength that I associate with products from this company. Add the usual slew of technical issues and poor choice payoff, and you have what is easily one of Telltale's weakest seasons. Though the opening and finale are quite good, and though I would recommend this season for the John Doe experience alone, I can't say that I'd recommend you spend your hard-earned money on The Enemy Within unless it's on sale.

Let us review:
The usual technical problems - 1.0
The usual poor choice payoff - 1.0
3 out of the 5 episodes are weak - 1.0
Ultimately forgettable plot - 0.4

The final score for Batman: The Enemy Within is...





6.6/10 - Bat-Ok, I guess
Better luck next time, Telltale games, better luck next time.