Steam Curator

Being a Japanese high school student by day and sports themed power ranger by night fuels a fast paced 5 hour platformer that hits most of the same beats you’d expect given its genre. A baseball star has gotta be one of the funnier conceits for a 2D pixel mascot, and Bat Boy is at its best when it leans into that premise. Look you get a button to call your shot, that’s a nice touch.

But maybe its greatest shortcoming is how it only scratches the surfaces of that fantasy. It’s sports theme is ultimately its most compelling trait, but it lacks the confidence to truly step up to that plate and instead relies heavily on its genres tropes to a fault.

In doing so it creates a predictable mechanical facsimile of both its NES muses and its indie contemporaries that share those influences; resulting in an occasionally enjoyable but ultimately forgettable 2D platformer.

Baseball Bats are not swords, and its when Bat Boy acknowledges this when its at its peak. Sure you can swing it around like a conventional melee weapon and you even get a Ducktales pogo jump with it… but its the infusion of some good ol’ baseballin where this games voice can be felt.

That means a heavier level of projectile interaction than you’d usually expect. Most inbound missiles aren’t just there to be dodged but swung at, sending them flying back at their sender or whatever else makes sense in the moment.

That even has implications beyond combat: certain doors and switches only respond to 100 miles an hour of inbound bullets.

Bat Boy takes those baseball inspired mechanics and layers them on top of some of the best Japanese platformers of the 80s; Super Mario 3 Overworld and Megaman boss upgrades and all.

They’re the fundamentals of a fun retro throwback no doubt, and for folks in the market for those specific thrills then its kind of a no brainer. Cool character design, great pixel work, and a steady but intense escalation of challenge are here. Even the concept art kind of nails this pre-digital anime style that makes you nostalgic for a series that never existed.

I like BatBoy, but not as much as those boons may indicate… largely because of a few decisions that it makes that prevent it from entering the hall of fame for its genre.

It’s not necessarily any unforced errors. It has less to do with anything in particular that BatBoy gets wrong as much as it is the stuff its not getting right. Both from a functional and thematic standpoint, BatBoy is a game that gets killed on the intangibles, small inelegancies that bunt this premise instead of taking a full swing at it.

Nowhere is that better expemplified than with level themes that are… kind of off base. Within minutes of the game starting up you’ll be confronted by the villanious otherworldly big bad… who without any elite lackeys to call his own ends up mind controlling your team of Sports Sentai and taking them back to his dimension.

Turns out his dimension is a very standard progression of world themes, including but not limited to grass level, ice level, lava level, factory level, and airship level. Nothing much to do with the athletics that inform all of the character designs, aside from the ocassioinal sports themed baddie dropped here or there. Beyond just being kind of samey and predictable it leaves the bosses feeling like visitors in their own biomes, rather than logical extensions of the levels themselves.

The literal plot has them being plucked from our world and dropped into the villains and it’s regrettable that it feels that way too… as opposed to either giving us more grounded-real world stadiums and arenas or even more fantastical interpretations of what a sports based platforming level could be.

But bosses being fish out of water is amplified from a gameplay sense because their moves feel like it too. I don’t know if its literally possible to beat Bat Boy without using a single acquired power but it feels like it is, maybe except for the wall jump.

A stamina meter rations your usage of almost a dozen complimentary moves you get for beating each robot master… but you’ll probably end up dumping most of that meter into temporarily invulnerability to ignore half of the level hazards and not much else.

Despite the fact that you get rushes and grappling hooks, level design barely changes to accommodate for their inclusion. Their introduction lacks ceremony too: rather than having levels that are informed by your toolset that require a ramp of their mastery, you get these silo’d off mini tutorials each time you get a new power and then you’re off to the next level only to find that you’ll barely have any reason to use it anyway.

Doesn’t help that they’re all generally sport abilities rather than baseball abilities so that tightly designed baseball star moveset you start with gradually gets replaced by a general sportsman style, and loses some thematic cohesion along the way.

Even that projectile interaction can get a little inconsistent as you run into more and more enemies. Different bullet types behave in different ways, sometimes you’ll fire em back and sometimes they’ll be destroyed on impact, but you won’t always know which until you swing. It’s unpredictable because Bat Boy doesn’t really have any unified visual language that communicates how you interface with the world.

even distinguishing between whats foreground and whats background can be unclear in spots, I had moments where I walked right off an edge that didn’t look like a ledge at first glance.

Ultimately, Bat Boy’s strict adherence to the greats magnifies where it differs from them, and those differences aren’t always glamorous. Had it fully leaned into the baseball gameplay that makes it unique and designed it’s levels and challenges to glorify those differences instead of pulling from the NES platformer playbook, it could have been far more memorable and fulfilling.

It’s athletic premise is only gently sprinkled on top of rather than interwoven within the framework of the game, and without tight execution on its theme or gameplay it gives little reason not to play one of its inspirations instead. Though there is some fun to be had, it’s never quite the home run it could have been.