Batman - The Telltale Series: Realm of Shadows review - choice gaming?

The Arkham games on console proved that this humourless berk in a rubber suit is at least fun to play as, though, with his toy box of gadgets, his crazy fast car, his grapple hook, and the way he stalks terrified crooks from the shadows.

But a Telltale game can't match that action. So most of the time spent playing as Batman in this game sees you simply performing quick-time events: those bits where you press buttons (or swipe the screen) that flash up on screen.

Which are honestly about as engaging as I make them sound. The fights are flashy and generally well choreographed, but painfully dull to actually play.

So instead, you spend much of the game playing as the actual most boring man in Gotham: Bruce Wayne. The stilted, standoffish billionaire, whose only shred of personality comes from a few sarcastic statements made with a smug grin.

You'll spend a lot of time in the game dealing with politics and the press, as you try to help Harvey Dent get elected as mayor and attempt to squish a scandal that threatens to tarnish the Wayne name. Routine stuff.

As usual for a Telltale game, your primary mode of integration is deciding how to respond to characters in dialogue. Your choices - do you shake a mob boss's hand or not? Do you give a comment to a reporter? - will have some consequences and shape the story in future scenes and episodes.

Though, if it's anything like every other Telltale game, the game won't change much. You'll be taking different routes down the same road: the fact that you can see the pre-planned plot synopsises for upcoming episodes proves that you can't actually alter the narrative much.

And that's doubly obvious when playing as such a defined hero like Wayne.

You'll get to explore the boundaries of his character, and find your own answers to Batman's age-old question (how far should he take vigilante justice?) but you know you're not going to kill a crook. You know you're not going to become pals with a mob boss like Falcone.

It makes the choices feel a little hollow. We'll have to wait for future episodes to see how much the story will shift in response to your choices, but having seen a zillion other renditions of Batman it's hard to imagine that this game will take the character anywhere radically different.

Oh, and speaking of which, the use of well-known Batman characters and plot points does start to grate. Here's Alfred, warning Bruce that he might get hurt. Here's Selina Kyle - she's secretly cat woman, didn't you know?

Oh, and Wayne's parents were killed. During a botched robbery! In an alley! I had no idea!

Yawn, we've seen it all before. And usually with much better writing than this. The voice acting is good and the animation is alright, if a bit wooden, but some of the dialogue is truly cringe-worthy. The insensitive woman who reminded Bruce Wayne how his parents died for exposition purposes was particularly bad.

Mostly, though, it's just boring. The more grounded political stuff is just rote and uninteresting, and anything involving familiar Batman iconography is tragically overdone.

If you're a Batman nerd you'll probably relish the opportunity to explore Bruce Wayne's character and see what it's like to be an actual person in Gotham, rather than a walking tank. But those same fans must surely be tired of being introduced to Jim Gordon, and seeing Bruce Wayne's parents killed in slow-mo flashback by now?