My thoughts on Episode 2.
After recently replaying both episodes back to back, I can say episode 2 continues on making Bruce Wayne an interesting alter ego to play as compared to Batman and I found the twists and turns involving Bruce Wayne's past to be an interesting fresh take on the source material and I'm enjoying the new takes on familiar characters and I really did enjoy Oswald's theatrics and I'm interested to see where things go from here.
Sadly I have issues with this episode that keep it from being just as good as Episode 1.
First off, I'm not the biggest fan of how Episode 2 is paced, aside from the prologue and intro with Falcone, the episode feels like it's rushing to get the end quickly meaning there's not a lot of quiet moments where conversations and scenes last longer or a whole lot of development for other characters which don't get me wrong some characters do develop somewhat but not in a way that feels involving Imo.
The QTEs are still servicable but I'm not sure if Telltale really took the QTE criticism to heart as it seems like half of the QTEs will work by themselves. It would be nice if Telltale took a page from Wolf and just have the action scene play out differently if you miss some QTEs.
I also don't know why Telltale felt the need to add in a meta human like Blockbuster into this story considering Bruce never really talks about him with Alfred or even mentions him in the codex afterwards. You can argue he's there to challenge Batman, but aside from getting punched in the face really hard once, Bruce is able to take him out easily with the power of suit gadgets.
This game continues to be a complete disaster regarding technicals and I couldn't help but notice a few more glitches like a cop car going through a cops legs in the final chapter, the exact opposite of a choice I made previously registering in the episode, inconsistent frame rate and so on. I should also mention the graphics on the Children of Arkham TV broadcast at the end was inconsistently atrocious compared to the graphics to the rest of the game.
Overall I give the episode a 7/10, not bad just feels a little rushed compared to the previous episode.
Comments
I think Blockbuster's appearance means something. I didn't know who he was before this game, but I just looked him up and he looks a bit different than other renditions of him. The veins popping out on his shoulder kind of reminded me of the lines on Montoya's neck and mouth at the beginning so I think maybe Blockbuster might have been an experiment with the anger serum. Maybe they pumped him full of it and it made him super buff.
I agree, they have changed the design a fair bit but as you said it's essentially to fit with the story. Either way it's still in the same vein as the original version. Uses a serum, becomes really strong and it renders him to be a mindless brute. I'm definitely excited to see him appear again for round 2 or 3 I guess you could say.