I, as many Batman fans did, approached this games demo with a large collection of doubt and trepidation.

As with, almost, the same crowd, the demo sold me on the game - It felt perfect for a Batman game. In tune with the more recent movies Batman style, yet not entirely abandoning the established Batman universe (As the new movies tend to do, for good reason).

A lot of the old familiars are back for voice work, and the ever more common Mark Hammil. I tend not to make a big deal out of voice actors (even the exceptional ones), because for the most part, without a good VA, the immersion is absolutely ruined, and then the game tends to follow. Hammil voices the Joker, as you're likely aware, and despite his mostly.. Friendly excursions into VA work before, he is possibly one of the best VA's for the job. Conroy returns as the Batman, but as happened with the recent movie, the show was somewhat stolen by The Joker.

The audio tracks are well designed, well timed, and most importantly, everything is the right volume. A lot of games don't accomplish this very well, but the volume levels are well balanced out of the box.

Graphics, well, are typical for a game running on the UT3 engine. It looks pretty, everything's textured nicely, and well. Not all the surfaces are shiney! Which, I think, is a reasonable move forward for anything running on the UT3 engine.

What concerned me was how the game was going to be, whether it'd be liniar missions, or free roaming. I'm glad to say it was an acceptable level of both, and considering it let me decide which way to go, made me happy.

The boss fights are.. Confusing at best. I think this is where the difficulty curve goes a bit off the default "slowly up" type. What starts out as a boss fight early on in the game starts becoming a "common" enemy, and starts coming equipped with more general thugs. Fortunately the game doesn't start forcing you into fighting those, and the slightly more annoying/advanced generic thugs.

Some bosses are deceptively easy, while others are built for no end of frustration (Specifically the end boss), while still being possible if you're fast enough. However, some things are simply not obvious until you've died and the "tip" screen points you in the right direction.

The controls get a touch frustrating in some situations with tight camera angles, but that doesn't happen more than once, from what I can tell. They're all well placed, though, so it's not uncomfortable to play for extended periods of time (Say, 13 hours).

The plot makes about as much sense as any Batman plot does, but it's been written well, and is read well by the voice cast, so.. It's forgivable that it's slightly less than sane.

Being a bit of a Batman fan, I enjoyed this game a hell of a lot - so my opinion on its replay-ability (Which I will be doing once my thumbs recover) is likely to be quite skewed by bias.

Personally, I'd recommend you buy it, and play it. Immediately.