A nice surprise, a deeper look at Stephanie Brown, and a violent city on the brink of exploding.

I have to say I wasn't expecting to enjoy War Games as much as I did. Andersen Gabrych writes most of these issues, and maybe because I never heard of him before, but I didn't think he'd bring much to the table. Instead he gives us a Batman on the edge at all times dealing with both his successes but also failures while we get a deeper look into the batfamily as well.

While the first half isn't essential to the War Games major story arc it helps build up Batman's mind, Stephanie's character development, and even help give us a bigger picture into Tim, Oracle, and Nightwing. The second half is all the gangs going to war with each other and this includes targeting kids of the mafia families and this makes for some super compelling and hard to watch scenes with multiple characters.

I really enjoyed the deeper, darker, and more realistic sense this book had. Sometimes don't need to deal with big scary villains but more human, shooting, and killing ones do the job of filling in the "evil" role. A 4 out of 5.