Batman: The Brave and the Bold is a fun cartoon featuring wacky gadgets, themed villains, superhero team-ups, and corny jokes – it’s like an animated serial from the ’60s, blending the best of the Dick Sprang comics with the Adam West show and broadcasting half a century late.

The Batman: The Brave and the Bold video game looks like fun, too, which is awesome because Batman games are really hard to do well.  For every Arkham Asylum and Batman: Vengeance there’s a Batman: Dark Tomorrow and Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker. There are five key rules to making a good Batman game. We’ve listed them below – along with reasons why Brave and the Bold should be an excellent Batman video game.

Rule 1: It Retains the Graphic Style of the Cartoon
The world of The Dark Knight is a vast one, encompassing different visual from Gothic horror to hardboiled crime to gritty dystopia. Rather than mix and match design elements from the different takes, it’s essential to pick a visual style and stick with it in order to make a cool looking game. The early Batman games failed at this concept, putting Batman in blocky puzzle games (Batman, Amstrad CPC) or purple tights (Batman: the Movie, NES) that did little to showcase how awesome he and his world look.

Arkham Asylum, on the other hand, utilized the gritty stylization of Jim Lee’s comic work to illustrate a dark, realistic, open-world story (rather than drawing from Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum and utilizing Dave McKean’s art style, which would have produced a very different game). Batman: Vengeance did one better, utilizing the graphic style of The New Adventures of Batman television series to create a game that felt like a playable episode.

Brave and the Bold, like Vengeance, draws heavily on the cartoon for its stylistic design–so far, so good.

Rule 2: It Has True-To-Its-Universe Gameplay
Just as Dracula Batman can fly in a Victorian horror setting and Detective Batman out-Sherlocks Sherlock Holmes in detective stories, Batman can only believably do what the world around him lets him do—no more, no less.

Batman: Revenge of the Joker had Batman defeat every enemy (and crate, and wall) with pink Batarangs. Nowhere in Batman’s world is it indicated that he uses Batarangs that heavily – or anything pink. Ever. Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker translated its awesome, intelligent, cat-and-mouse source material into a short, mindless repetitive brawler (with spotty controls, no less).

Batman (the adaptation of the Tim Burton movie) was the first game to really understand this idea, and while it did have mutants that weren’t in the source film it did a great job of keeping the film’s rules. Batman could grapple to platforms – just like in the movie – and he could drive the Batmobile in the Genesis version – just like in the movie (and for the first time in any Batman game). Everything gamers expected of Batman from the film was here, and that’s why people loved it.

Brave and the Bold looks like it’s big on gadgets, superhero team-ups, and Adam West-style brawls, all of which follow the rules established by the show. Two for two.

Rule 3: It Retains the  Narrative Tone of the Cartoon
If you’re working with material as heavy and dark as the Tim Burton films, your game better look dark and be serious. If you’re working with the Technicolor tongue-in-cheek of the Joel Schumacher films, your game better be covered in neon and not take itself seriously. Game developers don’t always get this, and the results can be disastrous.

Batman Forever, for instance, took itself far too seriously and tried to be Mortal Kombat. Nobody wanted that. Had it used its source material’s silly tone, gamers would have probably enjoyed playing it; as it stands, gamers were disgusted by having blocky, mo-capped, almost-identical figures pound the snot out of each other in a Batman game. Batman and Robin was no better, drawing on its ludicrous B-movie source by creating…. a 3D beat-em-up. Sigh.

Thankfully, The Adventures of Batman and Robin did this well. Drawing from the cartoon of the same name, the game not only retained the source material’s visual style but also its tone. It was light when it needed to be, but appropriately heavy when dealing with its villains.

Brave and the Bold has anime-style swish lines for character introductions and character animations pulled right out of the cartoon. It looks like a fun lighthearted action brawler.

Rule 4: It Accurately Portrays Its Batman
The Dark Knight. The Caped Crusader. The Goddamn Batman. All 3 are Batman, all three have similar characteristics, but they’re not the same Batman. As the Dark Knight, Batman relies upon his wits and stealth to infiltrate the criminal underworld. The Caped Crusader is the more traditional superhero, utilizing gizmos, Robin and other superheroes to save the world. The Goddamn Batman is a melee-heavy borderline psychopath bent on wiping out crime. Depending upon your game, use whatever Batman – and accompanying abilities – makes sense. Don’t just throw stuff in there to make a game interesting.

Gotham City Racer had you shoot cars full of bank robbers. Batman never kills, so… yeah. Not really Batman. Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu took the same Batman from Vengeance and made him a Battletoad. Batman may beat the tar out of bad guys, but he doesn’t do it every minute of every day. Can he sneak his way around some of them, please?

The latest popular video game portrayal of Batman is as The Dark Knight, and both Batman Begins and Arkham Asylum showcased him well. Arkham capitalized on its environment and combat systems, creating a stealth mode to showcase something gamers had always wanted from their Batman: the opportunity to strike from the shadows. Batman Begins also utilized its open-world elements to give Batman space to roam. While the game felt more like Splinter Cell with Batman in it, it still allowed gamers to frighten and intimidate thugs – which Batman does with aplomb.

Brave and the Bold goes the Adam West route, giving us more Caped Crusader than Dark Knight. It’s totally in line with the show – and nice to see Batman as a gadget toting superhero again. Brownie points for that one, guys.

Rule 5: It Has to Play Well
The most important rule of all for a game – and the one most games mess up. Batman: Dark Tomorrow is the biggest offender in this category.  Adventures of Batman and Robin had gameplay so frustrating you could barely hit anything; Batman: Revenge of the Joker had hit detection so crummy you got killed by pointy edges of crates; but, Dark Tomorrow? That game had lousy controls, camera angles so awkward you couldn’t tell what you were hitting, missions so repetitive you felt like you were grinding through a cut-rate RPG, and an open-world layout than was neither interesting nor open.

LEGO Batman, by contrast, was awesome. Widely considered one of the best Batman games ever, LEGO Batman was a sprawling brawler with simple controls, a fixed camera, and tons of playable characters from the Batman universe. It made it easy to play in Batman’s world – and that’s the best a Batman game can hope for.

I have no idea what Brave and the Bold‘s  gameplay will be like until our review copy lands in hand, but given its target kiddy target audience, I hope it’ll be accessible.

These five rules provide a guideline to making a Batman game fans would be proud to play. Developers, be specific about the Batman you’re using – and consistent about the style of that Batman – and you’ll create a game worthy of your subject matter. Brave and the Bold looks like it might make the cut.