Attention: this review does not contain spoilers (not even from Season 1).
By now, we know quite well the storyline of Telltale’s narrative works and we know that usually after a debut episode trying to put together the mechanics and atmospheres that will become the foundation of the gaming experience comes a second generally calm chapter. Even Batman: The Enemy Within is no exception, even if it was possible to expect something more. Let’s find out why.
The fairness of the choices
After an interesting debut episode , as we have said, Bruce Wayne’s new adventure slows in dizzy, narrative, at The Pact . This Episode 2 runs from the beginning to the end with the hand-pulled hand brake and has been exploited by the authors to make way for the cast of characters and super-bad guys with which Batman will have to see it to bring some hope in houses of Gotham.
The cliffhanger that had characterized the closure of the Swap 1 is in short left suspended for future appointments. Likewise, The Pact is unable to replicate the pathos that was guaranteed by The Enigma , who had put a lot of fire into the fire to kidnap the player.
The result is that of an intermezzo episode that tries to take us a bit inside the world of Bruce / Batman, without really memorable sequences and without success, to the new final cliffhanger, to make us really stay with the suspended breath.
There will be choices in some sequences that will question your morality, but hopefully they will be weighed in the future in a way that is superior to those in episode 1: the possible consequences of our decisions in the first chapter , in fact, they go pretty bad for now – and it’s fairly clear that in a game that makes its reason for the change of events based on player decisions, it’s not what they like.
A case has been particularly brilliant and it is obvious that this is a bug, which made us feel frustrated enough: during the Episode 1, you found yourself having some characters in life or death, according to your choice. Well, come to Episode 2 and note that the character we had seen die is alive, while the one we have saved is mysteriously wounded (and how would it happen, among other things?)
Vaporized our decision. We hope that this will be resolved with a future retroactive fix that will put things in place. Specify that we are reviewing the game on PC and at the moment we do not know if anyone has run into this problem even on other platforms.
Another peculiarity we have noticed is that writing Written Version 2, signed by Luke McMullen, seems to have failed to fully create internal conflicts in the player: we made our choices with dialogue conviction after dialogue and at the end of events when they come show your stats against those in the gaming community, we noticed for the first time that 99.7% of the users had done it, in a specific sequence, just like we did. This is a very high percentage, which further points out that The Pact , while remaining an honest bridge episode, has not been able to create real internal dilemmas in the heart of the player. A problem that affects the emotions that the episode will leave you, which will be few.
Calm flat also hand controller
While in The Enigma we had noticed Telltale’s desire to field a taster of all the mechanics that will feature The Enemy Within , this time it has gone completely opposite: within The Pact even the QTEs are reduced to the bone , in the face of a preponderance of absolute dialogues . Indeed, knowing friends and enemies involves a lot of jokes, but the result is a central-final part that was extremely flat and too bland in times. We would have preferred a different management of narrative rhythms, which also affect gameplay mechanics.
That’s not all, because The Pact does candidly even less than the peculiar inquiry-phases of this series-and places much less emphasis on the relationship system that had been highlighted in Episode 1. That, even though you are destined to spend much of the approximately two hours of time playing cards with the cast members of the game to get their trust. It will be, at least for now, a “friendship” that will only affect the final episode of the episode, one of the few with the QTE. We are waiting to find out if there will be repercussions (and how much) on future sequences.
