Bat Boy is not, as you may reasonably expect, a game about Bruce Wayne when he was much younger. And it doesn’t feature a single bat related gadget anywhere; sad as this news may be. If anything, it is even stranger than that.
Coming from Sonzai Games and X PLUS, Bat Boy follows the exploits of a high school kid who has a dual identity. Okay, maybe a bit like Batman. Anyway, we’ll cover the motivation of our hero as we go through the review, and given that this is a retro styled platformer, your fingers will need to be ready for the challenge. And more to the point, so will mine…
The story of Bat Boy is about as daft as you’d expect. We are a high school kid named Ryosuke who has a secret identity – after darkness falls, we go onto the streets to fight crime as the titular Bat Boy. This basically involves us dressing up in a kind of robotic baseball uniform, and delivering bat based justice to the miscreants we come across. But we don’t do it alone, oh no – we have a team of friends who all join in, with outfits and abilities based on their sports.
Well, one night we are accosted by a “interdimensional mage” who goes by the name of Lord Vicious. With a name like that, was he ever going to be anything but a bad guy? Anyway, old Vic captures every member of the team except us, as he wishes them to take part in something called the Trials of Darkness, which has a quite a high mortality rate. What else can we do but follow and attempt to save our friends? Oh. and just to add that little bit of spice, they have been brainwashed and will attack us on sight. Still, piece of cake, right?
Presentation of the game (and indeed most of the ideas behind it) is based on the old skool platformers from the 8-bit era, with a particular leaning towards the older Mega Man games. The game is mainly a side scrolling platformer with lovely pixel art graphics; it certainly looks the part. The action moves at a fair old speed as well, so there are no complaints with the way that everything looks.
The sound is pretty much bang on as well. Period correct music plays in the background and the gentle sound of a baseball bat being applied to enemies and projectiles is all nicely realised. If you have played a game from this era, then you will know what to expect.
The other thing that is present and correct from those old games of yesteryear is the difficulty. Bat Boy is as hard as nails, and requires much younger reflexes than my creaking old fingers can manage. The game follows the same basic premise as the older Mega Man games too – fight your way through a level to the end, find the boss and take him out, then you will receive an new power that will help you in the later levels.
As an example, the first boss we beat gives us the ability to throw our bat. Now this doesn’t sound awfully helpful (why would we throw our weapon away?) but it turns out that a spinning bat can not only activate switches to keep doors open, but it can also be used as a platform to let us cross larger gaps than usual.
As we go and get new abilities, this obviously opens new places that we can visit, and on the map screen we can select which area we want to go and visit next. Doing the levels in order seems to be a pretty good idea, as there are certain points that you can get to where a missing ability will block you from going any further.
Also, as I was talking about the difficulty, can I just express how much I hate some of the sections of this game, where the screen has a forced scroll, and if you don’t keep ahead of the edge of the screen, that is one health point gone. As you only have three to begin with, you need to keep moving, but this is easier said than done.There is one particular side scrolling bit where you have to cross a gap by bouncing on cannonballs, and the amount of tries this took quickly became ridiculous. Luckily, we seem to have infinite lives, which turns out to be extremely handy.
Apart from the crazy difficulty, the rest of Bat Boy is all pretty good, to be honest. It’ll certainly test you to the limit but ultimately any failure to progress will be down to you rather than the game. The controls are as tight and precise as you could hope for, and while I did have one weird episode where I fell through the stage and couldn’t get out (requiring a restart of the game, as it was completely unresponsive) the rest of the gameplay has been pretty impressive.
In conclusion, if you want something to scratch the retro platformer itch, Bat Boy could well fit the bill. Just don’t go into it expecting it to be a pushover!
