Catwoman

Argonaut Games spent the 1990s doing clever things with hardware nobody thought could manage them, and then closed its doors in 2004. One of the last things it shipped was a licensed action game for a Halle Berry vehicle that had already been written off before it reached cinemas. Knowing that ending changes how the game reads. There is real ambition in the movement design here, and almost none of it survives contact with the execution.

The idea is sound enough. Catwoman is agile in a way most third-person action protagonists of the era were not, built around climbing surfaces, balancing along beams and using the whip as both weapon and grapple. Levels are vertical, full of pipes and ledges and rooftop gaps meant to be crossed in one continuous line. When a swing connects and the animation flows, you glimpse the game somebody intended.

The camera destroys it. Cling to a wall and it swings behind geometry; leap for a handhold and it decides mid-air to reframe, so a jump you had lined up sails past. Combat suffers the same problem, since the enemy you are fighting is often just off-screen while the lock-on argues with the terrain. Very little of the platforming feels like a test of judgment, because you rarely have the information a fair test requires. It becomes a matter of repetition until the geometry cooperates.

The fighting is thin by design, a small set of strings and a whip attack repeated on identical guards, with stealth takedowns that work when the guard's patrol happens to line up and fail silently when it does not. Cutscenes lean on the film's plot, all cosmetics conspiracy and rooftop posturing, delivered at a budget that shows in every stiff mouth. It says something that the most memorable thing about the package is the licensing deal behind it rather than anything you do with the controller.

As an artefact it earns a look, because 2004 was the high-water mark of the film tie-in economy and this is what the deadline squeeze produced even at a studio with genuine talent on staff. There is a better game buried inside these levels, one where a single camera pass and another few months of tuning let the acrobatics breathe. Argonaut never got to make it. What remains is a cat that lands badly, over and over.