It's not really DLC stuff anymore, now that the most readily available version of the game just includes them, but what they used to be is still obvious.
The Catwoman campaign isn't awful in a vacuum, but it suffers from being part of a main campaign into which it is very poorly-integrated. From a clumsy opening that sees the player fumbling around as Catwoman before Bruce Wayne even gets thrown into the open-air prison to a weirdly gigantic gap in the middle where absolutely nothing happens to Selina, to an ending that tries to offer the player a moral choice only to literally rewind if they choose something different from a predetermined outcome, if I didn't know in advance it was part of what was then called Project Ten Dollar I'd be absolutely mystified.
Gameplay as Catwoman is a little uneven. Being able to climb around on ceilings is fun for a bit, but the character moves pretty slowly that way and her lack of tools compared to Batman makes her Post-Final Boss especially difficult when he starts summoning endless reinforcements. Just cornering him and beating him up actually works better than trying to fight smarter not harder! Catwoman's also kind of a wimp compared to Batman; she can't upgrade her hitpoints and armor as effectively as Bruce and she has fewer gadgets and a harder time knocking enemies down. It fits the character, but it all adds up to just being, well, a weaker version of Batman. Even her Riddler challenges are mostly piss-easy, with the game having to contrive a reason Batman can't just pick up her trophies the way she can his and never even explaining why exactly the Riddler cares about Catwoman.
Also, while I appreciate that a valiant effort was made to make Selina move as much like a cat as possible, from dropping to all fours when sneaking to cat sounds playing when she makes a takedown, the results are often unintentionally hilarious, and nearly every line of her dialogue is either as flirty as possible or as cocky as possible. It's all very clumsy is my point, although I did appreciate the ending where she decided to ditch the score of a lifetime to save Batman.
Robin's campaign is more fun. It's got a tighter dungeon design, and while he also has far fewer gadgets than Batman he uses variants on Batman's arsenal in fun and creative ways. He also hits bad guys with a stick, which seems much more effective than Catwoman's claws generally, and as someone slowly drifting from ambivalent on the subject of Harley Quinn into the harbor of confirmed hater, an unabashedly unsympathetic take on the character was practically refreshing. It doesn't have as strong an ending as I'd like, but it makes for an honestly pretty good epilogue to a game I liked well enough but didn't love, and would be a good ending for my time with the series if I weren't planning on revisiting some fond memories in Asylum to wrap things up.
DLC Stuff
Eh, James does it this way.
It's not really DLC stuff anymore, now that the most readily available version of the game just includes them, but what they used to be is still obvious.
The Catwoman campaign isn't awful in a vacuum, but it suffers from being part of a main campaign into which it is very poorly-integrated. From a clumsy opening that sees the player fumbling around as Catwoman before Bruce Wayne even gets thrown into the open-air prison to a weirdly gigantic gap in the middle where absolutely nothing happens to Selina, to an ending that tries to offer the player a moral choice only to literally rewind if they choose something different from a predetermined outcome, if I didn't know in advance it was part of what was then called Project Ten Dollar I'd be absolutely mystified.
Gameplay as Catwoman is a little uneven. Being able to climb around on ceilings is fun for a bit, but the character moves pretty slowly that way and her lack of tools compared to Batman makes her Post-Final Boss especially difficult when he starts summoning endless reinforcements. Just cornering him and beating him up actually works better than trying to fight smarter not harder! Catwoman's also kind of a wimp compared to Batman; she can't upgrade her hitpoints and armor as effectively as Bruce and she has fewer gadgets and a harder time knocking enemies down. It fits the character, but it all adds up to just being, well, a weaker version of Batman. Even her Riddler challenges are mostly piss-easy, with the game having to contrive a reason Batman can't just pick up her trophies the way she can his and never even explaining why exactly the Riddler cares about Catwoman.
Also, while I appreciate that a valiant effort was made to make Selina move as much like a cat as possible, from dropping to all fours when sneaking to cat sounds playing when she makes a takedown, the results are often unintentionally hilarious, and nearly every line of her dialogue is either as flirty as possible or as cocky as possible. It's all very clumsy is my point, although I did appreciate the ending where she decided to ditch the score of a lifetime to save Batman.
Robin's campaign is more fun. It's got a tighter dungeon design, and while he also has far fewer gadgets than Batman he uses variants on Batman's arsenal in fun and creative ways. He also hits bad guys with a stick, which seems much more effective than Catwoman's claws generally, and as someone slowly drifting from ambivalent on the subject of Harley Quinn into the harbor of confirmed hater, an unabashedly unsympathetic take on the character was practically refreshing. It doesn't have as strong an ending as I'd like, but it makes for an honestly pretty good epilogue to a game I liked well enough but didn't love, and would be a good ending for my time with the series if I weren't planning on revisiting some fond memories in Asylum to wrap things up.