Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu

For those curious, Sin-Tzu is a new Batman villian, making his debut in this very game. He's a conqueror from Asia who has won every war he engaged in and now seeks for a new challenge; Batman and Gotham City. He's released every prisoner and calls on the help of the Scarecrow, Clayface and Bane to assist him. To stop him, Batman has teamed up with a Robin that can't be older than 12, Batgirl and Nightshade to pound countless thugs.

The game resembles a Streets of Rage/Final Fight style beat-em-up. You go from area to area beating up thugs. You can punch, kick, throw stuff, block and do a useful roll out of harm's way. To move on to a new area, you have to beat up all the thugs present. Thrown into the mix are hostages and bombs, and you have a time limit to get to the next bomb or hostage, or you'll fail the mission. It's a neat element, but sometimes it can get frustrating where there's only a few seconds left and a bomb or hostage is right in front of you but an invisible wall prevents you from getting to it because you missed a single enemy that hasn't spawned yet.

At the end of a level, you'll get ranked on your performance and get a certain amount of points. These points can be spent to buy new moves or tokens to unlock stuff (there isn't much stuff worth unlocking anyways.) You're encouraged to mix up your moves instead of doing the same three hit combos (though some moves require you to press a button twice, don't press anything for a second then press an attack. Tricky stuff for a twitch-action beat-em up but you get the hang of it.) as well as attack multiple enemies at once, throw as many hits as you can in succession. As you whale on your enemies, a power meter builds and when it's filled, you can at any point enter a special mode. Here, you can do more powerful attacks that can knock out a bunch of enemies.

You can play as any of the aformentioned four good guys. Their attacks are roughly the same but they each move at different speeds and pack different amounts of punch. You can play the game with another person, but odd enough, you can't play four player, even though there's four characters.

Rise of Sin-Tzu suffers from the major problem that hinders nearly every beat-em up; repetition. Every level is the exact same thing, except the thugs will look slightly different, have slightly different projectiles and have more health. Speaking of which, only mini-bosses and bosses will have their health shown to you. Everyone else (and that's a lot of thugs) won't so you don't quite know when they're down for the count. It gets boring really fast.

Batman : Rise of Sin Tzu now goes for $30 CDN. That's an incredibly low price for what may be the greatest Batman game ever. So fans of the caped crusader should take notice.