It must be one of the trickiest jobs in game development to get the difficulty setting on a game right. Make it too easy and you get well and truly pasted in reviews for creating something that costs 40 quid for half-a-day's entertainment, make it too tough and nobody can get past the first level, they never get to see all the fabulous, clever and pretty stuff that you did later on, and nobody ever buys your games again because they can't see the point in forking out a huge sum of money just to get themselves really frustrated and unhappy when they could watch the news and do it for free. So companies employ playtesters to try out the games thoroughly before they get released and attempt to make sure that the thing's got a halfway-reasonable difficulty curve that lets players progress gradually through it, or if that fails, at least a few adjustable difficulty levels so that players of all abilities can have a chance to get a bit of value for money out of it. Leastways, that's what usually happens. With Batman Returns, someone obviously forgot.

This is one of the most annoyingly hard Mega Drive games it's been my misfortune to have been annoyed by in quite a long time. It's not the FACT that it's hard that's annoying, though, it's the WAY that it's hard. Batman Returns is one of those games that only has one purpose in life, and it's not to provide fun. Nope, what Batman Returns is there for is to provide a challenge to be overcome, something to brag to your mates about for a couple of days, and then leave you free to buy the next big movie licence title, which should be conveniently coming along at any moment. Batman Returns is hard because if it wasn't, you'd notice how utterly utterly tedious it was and never play it after the first 10 minutes.

Cynical? Us? It's a bit hard to be otherwise when a game's such a blatant production-line piece of crap as this. Sunsoft have been rewriting this game for years now, for various films and various formats, and very little has changed in this particular incarnation. Oh yeah, sure, the graphics are a bit different (although in all honesty this isn't very far at all in front of the 8-bit Nintendo version of Batman), there are a few little bits of cosmetic tomfoolery like the level set in a crumbling old building which leans diagonally at 45 degrees to the horizontal, and all the different baddies and suchlike that you might expect, but at the end of the day it's the same old scene - you walk along a little bit, you clobber a baddie who appears out of nowhere very particular, you walk along a little bit further and do it again and so on until you either finish a level (hereby endowing you with the opportunity to do it all again against slightly different scenery) or die of boredom, or more likely get so completely fed up of Mega Drive games that you either buy a Super NES or give up video games forever and take up trainspotting.

I'm not joking, either. Utter tat like this is the biggest threat to the continued survival of the Mega Drive as a cutting-edge gamesplayer's machine in the next couple of years. As the SNES breaks more and more technical barriers, as the Neo Geo (maybe) develops a couple of halfway-decent games to go with its astounding specifications, as the Amiga and PC mount ever-heavier attacks on the console market with technical innovations and competitive pricing, punters are going to look at the Mega Drive, see what's at the top of the charts (because, let's face it, it's practically always the big licences which sell the most, not the best games), check it out, say 'Oh God, it's a totally awful, generic, ugly, lifeless, characterless, brainless, gutless, spleenless, seen-it-all-before lump of platform drivel, looks like the Mega Drive's all washed up. Anyone for a game of Super Mario 12?'

The graphics in Batman Returns are crap. Most of the backdrops are blobby, repetitive and featureless, so that you never really know where the hell you are - in the first level, for example, it's impossible to judge if dropping down the screen will result in you landing on a lower platform or falling off into endless space and dying. All three frames of the animation of most of the characters are very attractive by themselves, but put them into movement and you start to wonder if Batman is really Metal Mickey in a purple rubber suit. Most of the time the baddies are just characterless, lifeless, useless blobs with no distinguishing features other than the fact that they're obviously 'bad'. If the manual didn't tell you who everyone was, you'd never work it out for yourself, that's for sure.

The sound in Batman Returns is crap. Aimless, pointless, hopeless twittering signifying nothing very much, with the odd generic 'thump' and 'oof' ported across from any of a million other crap beat-'em-ups.

And the gameplay in Batman Returns? It'd be a good idea if there was some, mates. Don't kid yourself - this is completely pathetic, in fact it's worse than completely pathetic. Crap crap crap crap CRAP.

GRAPHICS 6

SOUND 5

GAMEPLAY 3

GAME SIZE ???

ADDICTION 5

Just about the least interesting job of a licence anyone could ever have made. Frustrating and hugely dull.

40 PERCENT