Reviews

i bought this one, back in '89. who cares? nobody.

first level: this is the best level. swinging with your bat-rope, killing people jumping on them, or slashing them with your fabulous bat-frisbee, dodging the toxic drops, and pushing the bastard joker in a deserved pool of acid. it's quite similar to robocop, only you're not rusty and slow.

second level: rather boring ride on the bat-mobile, the only fun is trying to hook up on the lamps and turning fastly without having to stop.

third level: nice'n'easy puzzle.

fourth level: unbearable dullness. dodge helicopters, cut the ropes that keep the toxic balloons near the streets and citizens (wherever they are) of gotham city.

fifth level: as the first one, so, not bad at all.

overall, the usual ocean's multilevel tie-in formula, too similar to the previous, and with various boring levels.

3/5.

edit:
ok, i'm gonna raise the vote of one point, because of the first level.

A summer event movie like this comes very rarely in the life of a pre-teen and back in about 1989 Tim Burtons take on Batman was really the one to see...

Unfortunately like everyone else who really wanted to see it, I was just slightly too young to be allowed in - and my parents weren't about to lie for me either.

So instead I got this game (several months later) in my Christmas sock. It multiloaded it's way on to my Beer-mat speccy over 5 levels of glorious monochrome.

There is no doubt that the first and last levels are the best - a brilliant scrolling platformer that plays very well even today. Some people play robocop and feel that this is worse - I don't agree. Robocop is too easy whereas Batman provides a good challenge. You are constantly getting that bit further with each go, drawing you back to try again.

The second and forth levels provide variety - whilst they do not stand on their own very well, the change to a simple arcade game is good even though the batmobile and batwing seem a bit underpowered...

For some reason the batwing suffers damage on contact with balloons(!) and the batmobile is bashed around by VW beetles and needs to turn left at every corner (I'm sure there must be a more direct route to the batcave than this!).

There's also a puzzle level that is a little weak for this sort of game.

All in all that was a good Christmas thanks to this game. Its a bit tough as it took me a couple of months to master. If you were lucky enough to own a 128k speccy then this game loaded in one part and had a VERY good soundtrack - including different music for each level. The graphics are also excellent throughout the game and hang together very well - it does all feel like one game rather than several bits 'stuck' together as some other multilevel games could.

And I did finally see that movie a couple of years later. It was okay, but I'd struggle to tell you much about it.

Luckily I can still remember the game well enough to knock that joker off the museum roof! One of my favourite spectrum games.

A movie licensed game that should have been great but is letdown by the quite uninspring gameplay in the later levels. Still it is great to try out and has a wonderful music score. A really good game but a shame it can't be more.

Above average movie tie-in.

I am sorry if some of you does not like the game as much as I do. To be honest I was a bit shocked with Mike Lamb´s (the guy who coded the game) interview at world of spectrum (http://www.worldofspectrum.org/interviews/LambMike.htm) dated 1997 when he said Batman the movie was bad! OMG! It´s my favourite game of all time. I love it because it mixes several different genera's in one game and also cause it follows the Tim Burton Movie fairly. Also it has one of the best music for spectrum in 128K mode. You can see my full review on my blog http://batmanxtra.blogspot.com/p/batman-movie-zx-spectrum-128k-review.html. Thanks

I never understood why this game got the praise it did, it's another boring multi-level format Ocean license.

The first level is a pretty bog standard platformer.

Then a driving level which is pretty crap, some fun twists like grappling lampposts to turn quickly. Why it doesn't rip batmans arm off I don't know?

Solve a crappy puzzle thing.

The Batplane to stop the balloon full of poison gas, boring, and super unfair in places.

...and the last level back to bog standard generic platforming.

Not a great game on the Speccy, but I remember some of my friends practically cumming their pants over the Amiga version at the time, which was exactly the same shite game with a lick of paint. A year or so later Sunsoft managed to make a version for the Megadrive with better levels, gameplay, and graphics, but it was still average at best.

Not a good game, and the rose tinted spex are off for one of those later Speccy title type explanations, budget houses were bringing out better games than this in 1989, and charging between 1/5th-1/3rd of the price for them.

.....and what makes this a really sad state affairs is that Ocean brought out Batman: Caped Crusader a year before this game, and it was great, pretty much 2 games in one, and both way more involved in the Batman Universe than this tosh. Shit! Even John Ritmans nonesensical iso-3D Batman was a pleasure compared to this pile of steaming nob!....and I hate iso-3D games!

1989 Ocean Software (UK)
by Mike Lamb, Dawn Drake and Matthew Cannon

This is a great movie tie-in, although some of the 5 levels are just average, but the first and last, which happen to have the same game motor, are excellent. Very similar to RoboCop although not as slow.
Each level features different key events appearing on Tim Burton film, I'm not gonna comment on the each level, because other reviewers have already done that very competently.
I know this is not the best Speccy game ever, but sometimes some of it's qualities real push me into thinking just that, sound and music are just perfect, creating a great ambience, graphics which are not the best feature of this game, are quite good, although a bit stocky. Movement is also very fluid and make the gameplay a real pleasure. Overall a very good game, which could have been excelent with a set of levels with the same equal quality and the first and last.