Batman Begins

The best idea in Eurocom's film adaptation is a meter. Thugs in a room have a fear level, and Batman raises it by working the environment rather than the enemies: swinging a caged light so it swings back at them, cracking a water pipe, dropping down from a gantry to take the man at the back out of sight of his friends. Push it far enough and the survivors stop shooting and start backing into corners, weapons on the floor, waiting to be knocked flat. It is a mechanical translation of the film's central thesis, and in 2005 that was a genuinely unusual thing for a licensed tie-in to attempt.

Everything around that idea is more conventional. The levels are corridors dressed as Gotham, running through the story beats of the movie in order, with grapple points and vent covers marked clearly enough that route-finding is never really in question. Combat outside the fear system is a simple counter-and-combo affair, years before the Arkham games made that loop the default. Batmobile stages arrive at intervals to break the rhythm, and they are the weakest thing here: fast, loud, and mostly about not clipping scenery.

What carries it further than it deserves is presentation. EA secured the cast, so Bale, Caine, Freeman, Neeson and Murphy all read their lines, and the game splices in actual footage from the film rather than approximating it with in-engine cutscenes. The result feels less like a game inspired by the movie than a slightly stiff playable edit of it. That is a compliment and a limitation at once.

Aged honestly, it is a short, guided action game with one very good design instinct and no ambition to build on it. Enemies never learn, the fear tactics repeat in the same handful of forms, and the whole thing is over in a few hours. But those first encounters where a room full of armed men falls apart because you smashed a skylight still land, and they point directly at what Rocksteady would systematise four years later. A footnote, then, but a footnote that understood the character before most games did.