G4TV

Warner has always done a fine job adapting DC's comics for animated TV. Batman, Superman, the Justice League, they've all been hits for ordinary folks and comicbook fiends alike. That's a neat trick, considering the notoriously picky tastes of the latter group.

Sadly, the same can't be said for the videogame industry's track record with those same characters. It's not all one long legacy of shame, but Superman 64 is remembered for its legendary awfulness, and plenty of Batman games would be too, if anyone remembered them at all.

This THQ-published take on the animated Teen Titans isn't going down in history either way. To its credit, it does a great job of nailing the TV show's style, a missing link between Japanese action cartoons and the art-deco look of the Batman animated series. On the other hand, it's too simple to hold your interest for too long, and it wastes a lot of the gameplay potential within the Titans team.

Titans on PS2 is a big, bright brawling game, like a stripped-down super-powered Gauntlet. All five TV Titans -- Robin, Raven, Starfire, Beast Boy, and the Cyborg -- are always on screen at once, and up to four humans can jump in and smack around bad guys at any time. Every character shares the same movement controls and three basic attacks: quick, strong, and ranged, plus a few charge attacks and chain combos that trigger different screen-clearing super-powers. Robin uses gadgets and martial arts, Beast Boy transforms into T-rexes or the Abominable Snowman, Starfire lets loose with wads of alien energy zap, and so on.

If it sounds like fun, it definitely looks like fun at first. There's a lot of detail to the cartoon world, with Havok physics to bounce around bits of debris, and the animation shares the show's exaggerated personality without being unnecessarily flashy. Even Beast Boy's rapid-fire transformations don't drag the pace down at all. Despite a few moments where the framerate slows down, the engine does a surprisingly good job keeping up with all the action and motion, even in wide-open areas.

Similarly, despite a few boss encounters where lines wind up in a broken-record loop, the soundtrack is peppered with enough quips to keep things light. Beast Boy is appropriately clueless, Raven is appropriately laconic, and Starfire maintains her canonical inability to master the English language. The plot traps the Titans in a virtual world devised by the villain Slade, which gives rise to a few fun jokes playing on the game-within-a-game. You can hear the developers talking when Robin explains what happens when texture maps disappear.

As far as it goes, the combat system is well-designed and well-tuned. Enemies defend well enough to balance ranged attacks with close combat, so it's worth the risk to charge in rather than hang back and plink at bad guys, and combos are worth the extra effort to learn and pull off. Getting multiple humans in on the action strains the limits of the camera perspective at times, but as has been the case since the days of Double Dragon, even the simplest brawler is more fun with a couple of friends to brawl with.

Most of the level designs are simple enough that nobody gets lost or stuck, although party members can still hang themselves in areas they can't get out of. That generally doesn't result in a fatal error -- the game resets a stuck ally's position once the rest of the team moves far enough away -- but it's still an unneccessary aggravation. Even more frustrating, sometimes an enemy will trap itself in a hard-to-reach place. If it's the last one that has to die before an event trigger will go off, finding a way to nail him can be a pain in the neck.

Those are incidental glitches, not symptoms of any major problem. The real problem is that the game simply repeats itself. Its level designs are very basic, as mentioned above, the bad guys (both minions and bosses) show too many recycled patterns, and the Titans themselves are just too much alike.

Some characters have faster projectile attacks, Cyborg is a bit stronger and slower than the rest of the team, Raven and Starfire can float over a few obstacles. Each character still shares a very similar set of attacks and combo effects, and there's nothing to the level designs or boss challenges that would demand more specialized skills if they had them. In the end, there's far more difference to how the heroes look than how they play.

That's what separates Titans from a better team superhero game. X-Men Legends, for instance, put a lot of time into building a big, diverse cast of heroes, so it's deeper and more replayable. Titans requires no strategy for setting up a team -- every character is always available, except in a few brief gimmicked challenges -- and there's not much tactical depth when it comes to picking a hero for a given situation, because there are so few puzzles or other wrinkles in the levels. Personal taste is more important than any practical consideration.

The multiplayer versus mode doesn't pick up much slack. There are entertaining bonus characters to unlock -- goofy DC villains like Dr. Light and the Mad Mod -- but the combat system's too simple to compare to a dedicated fighting or four-player brawling game. It's not going to make anyone forget Smash Brothers for a second.

Some might say, well, it's a kid's show and a kid's game, but kids these days are smart, and they've proven more than able to get their heads around complex games.  If you're going to hit your audience with meta-humor about wireframe graphics, you ought to follow up with gameplay that gives them just as much credit.

Review By: D. F. Smith
Video Produced By: Jonathan Solin