At its heart BRST is an action/fighter game along the lines of Streets of Rage. Whichever character you pick to play the storyline follows the same plotline. You start off rather slowly in order to learn the controls and the difficulty then starts to ramp up fairly quickly. As I mentioned there are four bosses to take on. In order to get to the bosses themselves you have to first go through a series of henchmen. This is fairly straightforward stuff. There are a lot of bad guys and you need to beat them up. Each level usually has a couple of different goals that you also need to meet in addition to beating everyone to a pulp. For example, in one case you may have to rescue a bunch of innocent civilians within a certain amount of time. One frustrating part about these missions is that you must defeat every henchman before you can continue further down the level. There will undoubtedly be a case where you can see the last civilian you must rescue and just as you’re about to reach them an invisible wall will stop you from getting there. So now you have to backtrack and find the one remaining thug to dispense of all while the clock is ticking away. I would think it difficult to explain to someone why you can’t save him or her right now because you have to go back around the corner and fight some more. There are also situations where you need to disable bombs or protect doorways and all sorts of other things. Actually there really isn’t that much more to do and that is one of the downfalls of the game. It can all too quickly become just of series of walking down the street punching and kicking. There is no doubt that BRST contains a lot of action, it’s just that it’s rather repetitive.

Uh, Batman? A little help, please? Batman?

Speaking of fighting there definitely is a lot of fighting here and that can lead to some very sore thumbs and fingers. While the basic controls for fighting in BRST are quickly learned, the more advanced moves can take a while to master. And even then you’re just about as well off by just doing a standard attack. The variety of attacks is impressive and it’s interesting to see them in action but more often than not I found myself just pushing as many buttons as fast as I could without any real strategy. Not a real good thing for a fighting game.

BRST is kind of hard to give a grade to. The general gameplay is kind of simplistic and pretty repetitive. However I found that the overall experience of the game pretty good. The graphics are very well done and look just like the current Batman cartoons. The atmosphere of the game is awesome. The way that the fog moves as you run trough it and the random trash rolling down the street all adds up to adding a great element to the game. Gotham City just feels alive in the game. The voice acting and sound effects are both top notch and the bonus material was fascinating, including a documentary about the creation of Sin Tzu as a new villain for the Batman world. Grading just on the control and gameplay I would give the game an average if not slightly below average score. But taking in account the details of the city, the atmosphere, the sound, the personality of the game I walk away from BRST with a fond memory and I will almost always give a few extra points for any game that allows cooperative gameplay.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 80%.  Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu is a case where the sum is greater than the parts. If you can get past the repetitive gameplay you may actually find a game with a great personality.

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