his is the modern, moody Dark Knight’s greatest game – fast paced, stylish, not very brainy, and often an easy, good time. Is it great? Heck no. Does it offer little substance, but an enjoyable handful of thrills? It does, more often than not.

Batman Beings takes just a few parts of the great comic hero’s identity and really drives them home. He’s only a man, so don’t bolt into a room full of armed goons and hope to get out safely. Scared enemies are weak enemies, so freak them out like a bad brown acid trip before they even see you.

In an easy, mass-market friendly way, the game does many of these things just fine. The difficulty is never high, and the interaction points to get large-scale scares going are easy to spot and satisfying to use. The problem for experienced gamers is that each of the game’s systems feels dumbed down, and major gameplay elements don’t evolve a lick from the first scene to the last. Examples like lock picking and hacking are small; but combat, equipment, and fear-inspiring tactics are bigger areas of lost opportunity.

There are other problems, too. Voice acting by the film’s cast is great, but the supporting goons miss more often than they hit. Interior environments feel repetitive and sterile, lacking the scope and detail of the exteriors. The Burnout-inspired driving levels are entirely too long and (again) repetitive. The entire list of things this game could improve on just point to one basic design principle – gameplay, story, and characters really should evolve over the course of the game. In Batman Begins, they do not.

Still, there are some good points and great ideas in here. The rendition of Arkham Asylum rocks. That level, along with the Narrows, is really well designed and takes good advantage of the heights that the Dark Knight will scale. There’s a nicely moody atmosphere throughout, and the expansion of areas from the movie is done logically and skillfully.

If Batman Begins were trying to be the pinnacle of stealth action, combat racing, and iconic hero adventure, it hasn’t reached any of those heights. Instead it apes some of the most accessible and memorable parts from these genre’s greatest games (like Splinter Cell’s lock picking and Burnout’s takedowns) and merges them with interesting, if somewhat underdeveloped, ideas like instilling fear in one’s enemies. This certainly isn’t the smart, wry Batman game that fans have always wanted, but it is a pretty decent base to build off of. I, for one, hope that EA takes the intelligence and skill of its audience to heart and really delivers a Batman classic the next time around.