In its first episode, Batman: The Telltale Series does a fair job of living up to the standard Telltale set in The Wolf Among Us. But I wouldn't really call that a good thing -- this is a Batman game, and like it or not, the standards are different.
It would be foolish to expect pulse-pounding action sequences from a Telltale game - they're just not on the same level as Rocksteady - but that didn't stop them from trying. Batman's quick-time events are similar to those in Wolf and in Telltale's other recent games, but played faster and with more moving elements on the screen. And their engine simply can't handle it. Some of the button prompts I missed were because my input never registered, and one was because the frame rate tanked so hard that I never even saw the prompt.
Fortunately, this game isn't too reliant on action sequences; unfortunately, its crime scene investigations aren't much more pleasant. While the Arkham games' detective-mode portions could be accused of being overly simplistic, this game's investigations apply a frustrating amount of "classic adventure game logic" in the form of 3D pixel hunting. You'll probably piece together the evidence long before Batman does, since he's still looking for a tiny, insignificant "clue" over in the corner somewhere.
Then there's the interactive storytelling, and I'm afraid that I have to be harsh on this. As a character, Bruce Wayne has been portrayed in multiple ways, in comics, TV, movies, and games; and Telltale's Batman makes the mistake of showing the player dialog options, but deciding what his personality "should" be, behind the scenes. When I tried to play Batman as a horrifying monster, and Bruce as a bumbling playboy (as in Batman: The Animated Series), the game chided me for my violence and my ineffectiveness. Later, scripted lines from Batman and/or Bruce would directly contradict the direction I'd intended to take.
By the end of the episode it really felt like there were "right" and "wrong" answers to the dialog prompts, and the game did a poor job of telegraphing which was which. And I know I'm not the only player with this perspective, because the end-of-episode recap said that almost everyone chose to help Jim Gordon instead of Vicki Vale -- neither character showed much personality in the game's first episode, but Gordon is just a better character in the Batman mythos.
This game also suffers heavily from a classic dialog-choice problem: Frequently, the option I saw and chose did not match up with what the character said as a result. (See also: Mass Effect, L.A. Noire.) It's a real immersion-killer.
The story itself was minimally engaging, up until an end-of-episode twist that I don't have enough interest to pursue. Nevermind that Batman just doesn't sound quite right from anyone other than Kevin Conroy, or that mafioso Carmine Falcone sounds an awful lot like Sully; despite Telltale's apparent desire to forge their own Batman, a lot of his story is either excessively familiar (as in the conflict between Mayor Hill and D.A. Harvey Dent), or overtly underdelivered (as in the overlong foreshadowing from Oswald "The Penguin" Cobblepot).
In retrospect, it was probably unfair of me to turn my appreciation of The Wolf Among Us into anticipation for Telltale's take on Batman. While they've shown me that they can do dark, adult stories in an interesting way, Batman comes with too much baggage to really be made their own. Hell, they might have been better off re-skinning the character as something original, like "The Flying Horror" or "Nightman."
Progress: Played the first episode.