Catwoman arrived in 2004 as a tie-in to a film that had already been dismissed, which is usually a death sentence for a licensed game. It shipped on Xbox, Nintendo GameCube, PC and PlayStation 2, developed by Argonaut Games and published by Electronic Arts. It is better than its reputation suggests, and it is also the last thing Argonaut made for a long time.
Halle Berry’s likeness, Jennifer Hale’s voice
The game carries the face of the film’s lead, Halle Berry. The voice, though, belongs to Jennifer Hale. That split is the smartest decision in the package. Berry’s likeness sells the box; Hale’s performance does the work, and it gives Patience Phillips a steadiness the film never quite found.
Catwoman is an action-adventure game, played in third person, built for one player with a split-screen option. It follows the movie loosely. Patience Phillips is a shy office worker inside the Hedare corporate empire. She stumbles onto her employers’ dark secret and is murdered for it. A supernatural Egyptian cat brings her back, and the resurrection comes with cat-like abilities. She returns as Catwoman and goes after the people who nearly killed her.
Climbing walls and swinging from poles
The core of Catwoman is movement. The player uses the heroine’s cat-like strength and agility to cross various environments and defeat various enemies. She climbs up walls. She swings from metal poles. Those two verbs carry most of the game’s pleasure, because traversal is where the character finally feels like the character.
There is exploration here too, in the mold of the Tomb Raider series, and puzzles at certain points that gate progress. Combat exists alongside it: players upgrade moves and string together simple combos. The combat is the weakest of the three pillars. The movement and the puzzles are what hold the thing together.
Argonaut’s long silence
Catwoman was Argonaut Software’s final game for 19 years. The studio did not release another until its relaunch in 2024. That figure comes with an asterisk the record insists on: Star Fox 2 was completed in 1995 but not released until 2017, so it does not count toward the gap.
Read that timeline and the game changes shape. This is not a throwaway licensed product from a studio with nothing else going on. It is a closing statement, and it explains the care in the traversal systems. Argonaut built a character who moves well and then stopped building anything for nearly two decades.
She is then revived by a supernatural Egyptian cat granting her cat-like abilities.
What the 7.1 actually means
The published critical score for Catwoman is 7.1 out of 10, drawn from an aggregate of 8 outlets. That number is honest. It is not a great game. It is a competent one with one genuinely good idea, executed with more polish than the license required.
The Hedare corporate empire plot is thin, and the revenge arc is the film’s, not the game’s. But the game does not need a better story. It needs the player to enjoy being Catwoman, and the wall-climbing and pole-swinging deliver that. The upgrade system and combo strings are shallow, though they never pretend to be deep.
Where it sits now
Catwoman is worth revisiting precisely because it refuses to be embarrassing. Licensed games of this era were often broken. This one works. The split-screen mode is a curiosity rather than a draw, and the single-player campaign is short, but nothing here feels cynical.
The likeness deal is the part that dates it. Berry’s face on a character voiced by Hale is a reminder of how these projects were assembled in 2004, star first and performance second. Hale’s work is the reason the character survives the arrangement.
Argonaut’s 19-year silence after Catwoman is the detail that lingers. A studio capable of this much mechanical competence should not have vanished for that long, and the relaunch in 2024 makes the gap look less like a choice and more like a loss.
Our verdict: 7.1 of 10. Catwoman is a licensed game that clears its own low bar comfortably. The traversal is the reason to play it, the combat is the reason to stop, and the score is exactly where it belongs.
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