Batman: Dark Tomorrow

[Guest Lethargic]

Wasn't sure if I should put this in the comic folder or here. I put it here obviously. I've never really reviewed a game before and this isn't really a review. I was posting about the game in a thread on another site for a couple of days. I ended up getting so mad at this game that I edited all the posts together in one big review then sent it to people at Kemco and DC Comics and also posted it on their respective message boards. That is why I tried to adress those people at the end of it. Thought I'd post it here too to try to talk people out of buying this piece of crap. Anyway, here is my rant....

 

Dark Tomorrow had been looking very promising in previews. Good buzz around it and all. The first GOOD Batman game it was sad. Too bad it got released. Too bad I paid money for it. Too bad I also traded in 2 other games to get a discount on it. Too bad it got made. I've played a lot of bad games. Many I can't remember, so I won't outright say that this one is the worst ever, I might have forgotten something worse than this. I can't imagine what it could've been though.

 

Actually, I wrote that paragraph yesterday, after another day of playing this game and being close to completing it, I can say with all sincerity that I believe this is the worst game I have ever personally played. Not because it's a Batman game but because it is simply a terrible, horendous game from top to bottom. Every aspect of this game is BAD. Nothing is redeeming about it. The cut scenes are great and fantastic, but the quality of the cut scenes simply makes me more mad that they didn't put in the same amount of effort to make the game even slightly PLAYABLE.

 

The game started out great. Of course, it was just a cinematic cut scene. But it was really good. Voices were good, the characters look fantastic, the story sounded interesting, it was very much like watching a real movie. It really got me in the mood to play. But then again, this is the first problem. Much like the Final Fantasy series, the cinematic aspect has taken over the game. At one point in the game you watch about a 5 minutes long scene, then you fight three thugs after a store robbery. Three kicks and it's over. Another cinematic for a couple of minutes. Swing around the city for a bit for no real reason just to make your way to the next scene. That's another problem, the scenes don't explain much. Sure it tells you a story but it doesn't give you any indication of what you're really trying to do. You have no idea what your destination is during the swinging level, you just follow the arrow. These cinematics ARE really great from start to finish. The problem is that the game seems to be there simply to get you from one scene to the next. If you laid these cut scenes out without the levels in between you could probably watch it like a cartoon. Some of the scenes are amazing looking. Some scenes looked so real that I did a double take. So how did the same people that made these make such a horrible game in between? I don't the Riddler himself could solve that puzzle. Watching these scenes is like watching a new Batman movie. The problem is, I don't want to WATCH a movie. I want to feel like I'm a character IN the movie. I want to feel like I have a reason to do what I'm doing and I never do.

 

The game's graphics are clunky and very unattractive when in action. The main characters all look fine, but the levels and lesser character look like total garbage. These are the worst graphics I've seen since Medal of Honor Frontline on PS2 which was the game that so turned me off that I got rid of the whole damn system. They seem to be going for the dark Batman, bleak, shadowy world, but they're version of that is just horrible. Look at a game like Splinter Cell. That game is all in shadows but it looks amazing and beautiful. Here it just looks like garbage. UGLY garbage. There are also problems like when Batman is swinging, there is no rope. You just see his arms and empty hands held over his head in a very strange pose.

 

Of course the main problem is the gameplay itself. From the character's movement to the control scheme, NOTHING is good here. Batman runs WAY too fast. The slightest movement on the stick, he's moving like the Flash. He also just LOOKS totally ridiculous. I don't know how to describe the way he moves. Imagine a down syndrome kid dressed as Batman running in the special olympics and you might get an idea. When you crouch to sneaky stealth mode he looks even more retarded.

 

Controls are the worst when it comes to swinging. Instead of being able to control the swing with the left stick, it's controlled with BOTH sticks. Left one turns him, right one goes back and forward. So it's hard as hell to get a good swing going and then release your grip at the right time to land on the next roof top. I mean, you have to push up with your right stick to go forward and then try to hit X or B with that same right thumb to jump off. By time you're jumping off you're already swinging backwards again. Why did they make it this way? Have these people ever made a game before? Just walking Batman is a total chore. Sometimes pushing down goes forward, sometimes pushing down goes left, sometimes pushing down goes back. It's pretty much a crapshoot.

 

This is being sold as a stealth game like a Splinter Cell or Metal Gear Solid. You can lean against the walls and sneak around, peak around the corner and all that. So far, I haven't found a spot to use it. It's basically just run straight forward until you see a guy, run right at him and kick him until he finally falls down. What I'm thinking is that there is eventually going to be like one level where you have to sneak. Just like how in the other Batman games they sell it by telling you how you'll get to drive the Batmobile or whatever. Once you play the game you have 9 levels of running and punching, with one really bad level of driving the Batmobile thrown in. Though, like I said, I'm near the end of the game and there hasn't been a level like that yet.

 

Fighting is HORRIBLE. You basically have punch, kick, jump. That is all Batman does. Reading the manual it tells you that Batman doesn't kill and all that, blah blah blah, he just knocks people out. Well, in this game he doesn't even do THAT. In the first few fight scenes, you have to take on about 3 guys at a time, all armed with machine guns. Which kill you pretty damn quick. One machine gun can drain your health meter in about 8 seconds. Three guys at once is a nightmare. You're supposed to have protection, the cape is supposed to be like a shield and will absorb damage. The cape has it's own meter which runs down when hit, but fills back up on it's own. The thing is, it only works if somebody hits you from behind, which never really happens. Some sort of defensive move should be in this game without a doubt. A block, a dodge, SOMETHING. There is no fight in this game that you can get through without coming out with your health significantly drained. Luckily, one of the game's drawbacks helps you with this. Levels seem to reload every 5 steps, every new hallway is a loading screen, every opened door is a loading screen. So basically you enter a hall, fight and get hurt, then move on to the next hallway. So when you die in the next hall it'll start you there when you continue. If it wasn't for the frequent loading screens there would be no way to get through this game.

 

Anyway, so say you're fighting three machine gunners. It takes anywhere from 5-10 hits to takes a guy out if you don't nail him with a running kick. You go to the first guy and knock him out, take out the second guy and then head for the third, by time you start hitting him, the first guy has gotten back up and is shooting you again. So on and so on. They hardly stay down at all. I finally figured out that you're supposed to cuff them once you got them down. (One of the MANY, MANY things that is left out of the 2 page instruction book.) So basically you gotta take all these guys down as quick as possible and try to get one of them cuffed before the other two get up. Most of the time the other 2 guys get up, shoot you off or kick you off. What makes this worse is that you can't see it happening. The camera angle zooms in on you as you cuff so you can't see what is going on with the other three guys. If you could see and know where they are, what they're doing, you might have a chance to defend yourself, instead you just get blindsided every time.

 

Anything over 2 or 3 guys at once is a total nightmare. I got to a point where I had to fight 7 guys. I hoped that I wouldn't have to fight them, maybe just run past them and go through the door. No dice. The door didn't open. Figured I had to kill all these guys to unlock the door. So I tried fighting them a few times. A couple of times I got ONE guy cuffed before dying and that was a miracle. So I decided, well maybe I'm supposed to use some of these bat gadgets. You only have two weapons. Batarang and a smoke bomb. I figured, hey, a group of guys standing around, I'll throw a smoke bomb right in the middle of them then run in and beat the crap out of them while they can't see. It turns out that the smoke bomb just makes a little puff of smoke that reaches up to the characters knees. What this thing is supposed to be used for I have no idea. It seems that it would never help you since it doesn't DO ANYTHING. Next plan was to use the batarangs. I run up to them, batarangs ready. I start throwing and I hit the first two, but the things only seem to work when you're close to the characters. If you're too far back, a targeting screen comes up that is impossible to use. A very slight tap on the stick and the sight goes flying off to the side. Plus the batarang never goes to where the sight is looking. It goes about a inch over and to the right. So you have to adjust your site to hit anything. Anyway, I tried it again, I ran up as close as I can and use the batarangs. Well, if you get close to the people, before you can even throw one, you're on the ground with a group of guys kicking the crap out of you. Plan C goes into effect at this point. Maybe this was the time to sneak! Finally some stealth action! Nope. They spotted me. I tried the lean against the wall and slide trick. Once I reached the corner I figured out that I could peak around the corner and fire batarangs at them without them seeing me. Great! Here it is! Wrong again. By time I was throwing at the fourth guy the others were already getting up.

 

I eventually got past those guys and here's the fun part....that door was still locked. Actually it's not a door, it's a gate in a chainlink fence! You've got a universal tool in your utility belt which is supposed to pick locks, among other things. Of course, the book nor the game teach you HOW to pick locks. I try everything but can't get it to do a thing. So I figured there must be some other way. This is just a fence after all and I'm friggin Batman! Batman can get over a fence right?

 

Not in this game. Batman can't climb the fence. He can't fire a grapple to get over it. He can't use a batarang rope to get over it. He can't even jump up, grab the top of the fence and flip over it or anything like that. I'm completely stuck. I have no idea what to do. You would think the mighty Batman wouldn't be defeated by the limited skills of a chainlink fence, but it appears that he is. I hate crap like that in video games. Hey, if you wanna make it where I have to do something to get the door open, no problem. But do NOT put crap in like a fence that a character like Batman should be able to go over with no problem and then not let me do it. That's just messsed up.

 

It turned out that the jumping up and grabbing the top of the fence to flip over WAS the way to do it. It's just really, really difficult to jump from the right position thanks to....take a wild guess.....the horrible camera!

 

It is amazing how difficult it is to just fight the "thugs". Like I said, unless you get lucky with a running kick, it takes a very long pounding to get these guys to go down and then once you get them down, they get back up. But yet ONE hit from a thug puts you on your back. Isn't this Batman here? Shouldn't he be able to absorb ONE PUNCH? Shouldn't he be able to level a normal thug guy with one punch or kick? Even more amazing is that as difficult as the thugs are, the boss characters are easy. I have NEVER DIED ONCE while fighting a boss character. You just mash punch and kick until they go down and you're done, usually with very little damage to you. Why do the thugs not stay down until you cuff them, but you don't have to cuff the "supervillains"? Though it does LET you cuff them. When you knock one down you can throw the cuffs on them, but they get up anyway. They don't escape or break the cuffs, they simply vanish into this air. Of course...even funnier than how easy the boss characters is the fact that you DON'T FIGHT MOST OF THEM. You don't fight Poison Ivy for example, instead of fighting her you fight a big tree and then you see a cut scene of Batman capturing Ivy. The worst is the Joker. I mean, the biggest of them all and you never fight him. You fight a bunch of escaped inmates and then you watch a cut scene of Batman knocking out the joker and capturing him. Who in the hell would make a Batman game where instead of FIGHTING the Joker you simply watch a CUT SCENE of Batman fighting the Joker? The worst part is that in the cut scene it only takes ONE PUNCH to take out the Joker. One single punch works on the Joker but not on the Joker's loony thugs.

 

Back to movement. Movement is made even harder by the terrible "camera" angles in the game. The camera seems to always be in the worst possible place. It seems like 50% of the time you can't even seen your character on screen. There is no way to turn the camera around like in most games. When you ARE on camera, it's focused TOO much on you. You walk in a door and you have three guys filling you with lead because you can't see them. The camera is shooting straight at you instead of from behind you. This is the biggest problem of the game by far and the one thing that makes the game so unplayable. Everything else could be ignored but this camera situation can not. It seems every game of this nature is designed so the right stick will allow you to pan the camera around to see what you need to see. Not this game! You can hardly see anything. You can't see up to see if you need to grapple something and you can't see down if it's safe to drop. This is made even more annoying due to the fact that the game designers decided that they'd be cute and make the entire game in a letterboxed format. I can not stress to you how bad the camera is in this game. It basically makes the game unplayable, the only reason I'm pushing on is because I wasted 50 dollars on this thing so I want to at least get through it before I resell it on ebay.

 

What this game is REALLY missing is a training level. Every game like this usually has a training level that teaches you how to do all the various moves and use all the various weapons. Not this one. It doesn't teach you a friggin thing. Neither does the game's manual. It doesn't tell you a thing. Basically you have to figure out everything on your own as you go. With the game being difficult already, not knowing what you're doing at first makes it extremely difficult. I don't understand why the creators of this game wanted the player to be playing completely blind. Who in the world wrote this instruction manual which teaches you nothing at all?

 

There's a lot more bad stuff I could comment on. The game doesn't get better later on, it only gets worse. I could go on and on but I'm gonna go ahead and quit.

 

I just find it very sad that DC's properties are tied to the companies that they're tied to. They can't make any movies cause they're tied to Warner Brothers who have dropped the ball at every turn. They always hook up with the world's worst game developers too. There's never been a truly great DC superhero video game anywhere. If they had any brains they would've sold the rights to the Batman comic book game to Ubi Soft. Ubi Soft already has the rights to make games based on the Animated Series, but you can't do much with that. Imagine Ubi Soft having the rights to Dark Tomorrow and putting the Batman characters into the Splinter Call game engine? That would be brilliant. I'd play that game for the rest of my life. That engine is perfect for the Batman universe. Instead, they sell the rights to Kemco and we get this bomb.

 

If anybody from DC happens to read this please listen to my advice. Take better care of your characters. Start looking at the track record of the companies you sell the rights to. Quit selling them to just anybody that comes along. Sell the rights to a company that will do justice to both the character AND the fans. If that's not possible...

 

To anybody from Kemco that reads this. This game is terrible. But it IS a step in the right direction. You had the right ideas, you just didn't execute them. A stealth based game with Batman would be a dream, but this one is a nightmare. Most of these problems could get fixed. The camera system needs to be fixed first of all. The control scheme needs a lot of work. Batman himself needs to be completely re-made. He looks great, but his movements are horrible. The fighting system needs to be expanded. Spend more time on the GAME than the cinematic aspects. If the gameplay was equal to those cut scenes, this would be one of the best games ever, instead it's one of the worst. I mean I've played games that were boring and not fun, but I've never played a game that I just downright hated as much as I hate this one. I hope a future sequel could correct the mistakes of the first one, but if sequels are just going to be using the exact same engine with a different story, count me out. From what I've read on various message boards, 80-90% of the people that bought the game said they were either going to return it to the store or re-sell it on Ebay. That's not good. This could be turned into a good game in future versions, but this version is a travesty. I really don't understand how anybody in the company played this and felt it was good enough to release.

 

Just to show that I'm not alone in this, I will post a bunch of quotes from various posters on the Dark Tomorrow message board on Gamefaqs....

 

"After such a long wait, I went out today and bought the newest Batman game. Speeding home, I placed it in the Xbox and immediately hit my knees asking God to forgive me for purchasing this game!!"

 

"I don't know what they did for all the months spent in development, but I think they made the game in a month and played Halo for the rest of the year."

 

"As others have said, the camera angles are stupid, never working in the favor of the player. Everytime Bats uses his batcable, you go to a cinamatic view of him throwing it, then switch to him swinging, viewed from behind."

 

"Very poorly done."

 

"Fighting is a joke. No special bat moves, just punch the thug and hope he stays down. The thugs have more power and moves than the world's greatest detective. It was a shame."

 

"When you're trying to navigate a small room with 2 doors, this makes it into a fun game of running in little circles as the camera switches back and forth."

 

"People, skip Batman: Dark Tomorrow, it is not even worth a rental fee in my opinion."

 

"The combat is extremely uninspired, a mishmash of punches and kicks where clowns with orange machineguns shoot you repeatedly as you wonder if you're close enough to hit them (hard to tell with the angles).... i think that the fixed-perspective works fine in games like RE and DMC because you're mostly using guns.... you can point and shoot. In Dark Tomorrow, it's all hand-to-hand, and almost impossible to gauge the proper distance, as you get pummeled."

 

"when i started up this game the intro movie had me excited then i started playing...the graphics are horrible...i've seen regular playstation games that looked better "

 

"Believe all the hype on this message board, it is embarassingly BAD! How can I get my money back??????"

 

"just bought it....OUCH!"

 

"its horrible man im tellin u DONT i repeat DONT buy this game "

 

"cinematics are cool, the rest of the game is garbage so far. fighting is horrible and rooftop swinging is also bad. im a hure bat-fan and cant believe that this would be released yet. i died probably 10 times during some rooftop swinging because of the way the camera is (im a veteran gamer too). the game loads after every few screens and each screen is somewhat small. batman moves awkward too."

 

"look, im not just saying this is bad, its horrible."

 

"a gang of ruthless mobsters busted into the batman game studio and beat the developers into retardation"

 

"the new hope for a return to good batman games was just washed a way in a cruel bath of bad camera angles silly movement and batman being built like the hulk but only being capable of punch, kick and suck! oh the humanity!"

 

"I'll be picking this game up when it hits the bargain bin."

 

The end.

 

 

The funniest thing about all of this is the fact that some asshole saw my review on one of the message boards I put it on. He copied it, changed about 8 words and then posted it on Gamefaqs as his own review. Now I'm in a friggin war with this guy. He's trying to lie and tell me I stole my own review from HIM!!! Even though, you know, I kinda know what I wrote! Plus I have the timestamps from all the message boards I put it on to prove that I did it before he did.

[Guest Downhome]

Holy shit, are YOU the guy that I quoted from that board!?

 

Look at this thread...

 

http://forums.thesmartmarks.com/index.php?...ST&f=14&t=28602

 

...I was looking on the net, found your review somewhere else, and already posted it, lol.

 

Great review, but for some crazy ass reason I still want to play the game. I'm hoping against hope that I would at least personally find it enjoyable.

 

I'm going to rent it at least, I have to, then I can share my thoughts, heh.

[Guest Downhome]

I'll ask you this as I've asked someone else, and I haven't had it answered yet...

 

...if I enjoyed Batman Vengence, will I at least find something in this I will like?

[Guest Lethargic]

Haha. Yep, that was me. Unless you believe the asshole that is trying to claim that he wrote my review WEEKS ago and that I stole it from him. This guy is hysterical. haha

 

I looked for another thread before starting this one and didn't find it.

 

Only Batman fans will get anything out of it I think. It's just not a good game period. But if you're heavily into Batman, you at least try to look past the camera crap and play it. It depends on how much of a fan you are and how much you're willing to overlook just to play a Batman game. I almost kept it just because as sad as it is, it's my only option to play a Batman game. But then I wised up and sold it. Even if it was good, it's still incredibly short. You can rent it and do everything 2 or 3 times over before having to take it back. It took about 3 hours of playing time to go through the game the first time even with all the frustrating hard to figure out parts. It only took an hour to go through it all again once I knew how to do the crap that I got stuck on the first time. I only play video games about an hour a day and I've been through it twice since Wednesday.

 

Vengeance, not being a great game either, is better than this one. Once again, that was a game that was only fun to me because it was Batman. Anything else and I wouldn't even have bothered with it. But I went through that game a few times as well and I never hated it and never wanted to get rid of it like this one.

 

It also depends on if you have Gamecube or Xbox version. Apparently the GC version doesn't have as many problems as the Xbox version. Of course that's according to GC owners and I don't trust their video game opinions anyway. haha

[Guest Downhome]

Hmmm, I might check it out, I dunno. I still say that Batman Returns is my favorite Batman game to date, I still play it every so offten.

 

Did you get this at EB? As you more than likely know, if you got it there, you can take it back and trade it in for full credit.

[Guest Jobber of the Week]

Did you get this at EB? As you more than likely know, if you got it there, you can take it back and trade it in for full credit.

EB's changed their policy. Too many people returning it soley because "This game sucked" and generally using the joint like a $50 Blockbuster.