Back on the WayForward train, with a pair of games based on the 2008 Batman cartoon of the same name.

The show “The Brave and the Bold” is a villain-of-the-week affair, with each episode having Batman team up with another hero from across the DC universe. The character designs are often intended as retro throwbacks, including Bats himself. WayForward’s game adaptations are authentic to the format, with the Wii version in particular feeling like you’re playing out episodes of the show.

Both games are beat-em-up/platformer hybrids, but they differ from each other quite a bit. On DS you have a single-player experience, a selection of relatively shorter levels to pick from and extra mini-challenges, rendered in fluid pixel-art style. The Wii game has simultaneous co-op in longer “episodes” (even including introductory teaser fights like the show), with a smooth animated look and depth to the foregrounds and backgrounds. There’s a lot more smaller differences to the specifics of how each version plays but they aren’t worth getting into. The content is also completely exclusive to the separate versions; even when there’s overlap between playable partner heroes, they play differently.

The two platforms thus justify themselves as separate experiences. There’s even supposed to be a way for a second (or even third) player to use the DS one to interact with the Wii one in a rare bit of cross-platform connectivity, but I had trouble getting it to work (the disc didn’t read well on Wii so I used the Wii U, maybe that’s why?) and I was playing solo anyway. In fact technical troubles prevented me from finishing the Wii game unfortunately, with continual disc read errors popping up as I started the final episode with Green Lantern.

My favourite part of the DS version was upgrading Batman’s abilities to eventual powerhouse status, and finding collectibles which show off character designs (even for characters who don’t appear in the game). For the Wii version I liked the voiceover banter between the pair of heroes during levels, and the variety of moves available for combat. Both versions have plenty of fun levels full of platforming challenges and bash-em-smash-em action.

The selection of the supporting cast is unfortunately very much a boy’s club, with the only woman being Black Canary as a one-off support power on Wii. The same goes for the villains for the most part, except for Catwoman, again on Wii. I do like the different playstyles of the partners, especially Blue Beetle (who contrary to this property often opting for older incarnations of characters, is the newer Jaime Reyes version), and I also enjoyed encountering other rarely-seen characters in the casts.

Apart from that, these games showcase WayForward’s strengths with excellent animation and fun levels. I suspect the co-op AI in the Wii version also uses some common code with A Boy and His Blob, because I caught the partner character doing some of the amusing behaviours I remember from that game, such as getting stuck and jumping in place. Either way, this was a solid destination on my WayForward journey… I mentioned trains at the start… choo choo.