Don't get me wrong, Batman was a fairly good game and definitely worth the one playthrough.
But it is hardly the second coming of god as people keep making it out to be. It is not on the level of Beethoven and Mozart by a long shot. I think some people are looking at it through the Batgoggles, and not as a game in and of itself.
The combat system is rather competent, but in the end it's mostly just a fancy set of animations for a fairly limited arsenal. You have punch, stun, batarang (which is just stun at longer range), throw, and takedown. While they all work very well, and the animations are good, it's lacking the depth and satisfaction of games with a two-attack (two different "punches") system, like Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden.
The game world and its exploration is a little small, for my tastes. I was rather disappointed to see that there wasn't any real exploration as far as new places to go, or finding out how to progress -- progession itself was very linear, and the exploration just amounted to various small holes in the wall that you needed item X to open up. I compare it to Metroid games by saying that in Metroid, new abilities are almost more frequently new forms of mobility than new forms of weaponry, which allows you to get around your environment in new and interesting ways. This only really occurs with the Line Launcher in Batman, and it's mostly confined to crossing two or three mandatory pits in the game, and finding four or five of the ridler secrets. It was also unnecesarily frustrating to find a secret area, sometimes after a fairly complex (for this game) jumping puzzle, only to find that they'd blocked it off with Item X (usually the super batclaw) arbitrarily. The places were easy to find so there was no sense of accomplishment, but all of them had a "come back later" sticker on them. In Metroid, these lead to entirely new areas, or new shortcuts between areas, and contain weapon upgrades. In Batman, these are simple boxes containing Ridler Doohickey #123917830192, which does nothing other than advance your counter towards an achievement which has a very unsatisfying reward.
The story is a little on the undetailed side. What's there is great, and the characters are well-written and very well-acted. There's just not a whole lot to it. The Scarecrow sequences were very imaginative and nicely done, but most of them just took the time to delve into a past we're already extremely well aware of and have seen hundreds of times before. They felt tacked-on.
The game was definitely good and worth the playthrough despite these faults. But for me, it's too flawed to heap the mountains of praise that people do.
