The second episode of Telltale's batman series came out this week. I really enjoyed the first episode and it was my first time playing a telltale game. Episode two in my opinion is even better than episode one. The previous episode ended on a cliffhanger with Bruce Wayne finding out his family had connections to the mob. This was an interesting spin on the Wayne family that I haven't seen before. The murder of the Wayne's was always told as just a murder in cold blood. In telltale's version it's being told as an assassination because of the families mob connections. Bruce is having trouble with the realization that his parents were corrupted by the mob. The episode starts out with him trying to find answers about his parents.
I was locked in from the moment the episode started. The story is compelling and when I finished the episode, I was upset I couldn't move on to the next one immediately. Bruce visits Carmine Falcone to try and get answers about his parents. But Falcone is assassinated in the hospital before he could find out. Falcone's murder gave Harvey Dent's campaign for mayor more issues, because he was in the hospital during the murder. He now is being forced to distance himself from Bruce because of the allegations on his family legacy.
There is also a different spin on the character of Oswald Cobblepot/Penguin. In this story Bruce Wayne grew up with Oswald and they were good friends. Penguin is in this episode a lot more crashing a debate between Harvey Dent and Mayor Hamilton Hill. Cobblepot has a personal issue with the Wayne family due to some questionable treatment of people in Arkham Asylum.
Catwoman, also has a bigger role in this episode. She teams up with batman to help him take down Penguin. Gameplay stays is the same from the previous episode with quicktime events and detective work. There is less detective work this time around, with bigger action sequences. The action was a littler more fun this time, with a great bar fight scene. The action where batman and catwoman teamed up were my favorite action sequences. This episode also gives the player a choice whether to investigate Mayor Hill as Batman or Bruce Wayne. If you go in as batman you'll get answers quickly but it will effect batman's relationship with the police. Go in as Bruce Wayne you will have to smooth talk Mayor hill into getting questions answered. I chose batman because I thought it would be easier to get Hill to talk. But my relationship with the police is pretty bad, because I brutalized Falcone last episode on tv. This made my relationship with the police even worse.
The episode ended with penguin murdering Mayor hill when he crashed the debate. I can't wait to see where the story goes next. I highly recommend giving this series a shot. Especially if you never played a telltale series before. My only issues with the game our the technical issues. I experienced significant frame rate drops during my play through. For a game like this that's not meant to be a graphical juggernaut, i'm not sure why there are such bad frame rate drops.
