I put a post on Facebook recently about how I thought Batman: Arkham City was only potentially going to be good. My friend was quick to pull me up on this, questioning my use of the word potentially. I then went on to explain that I was 99% sure that the game was going to be good and the final 1% was in the hands of what I was calling the “George Clooney” variable. Unfortunately “George Clooney” has had a much greater influence on the game than I would have liked but despite all my upcoming criticisms, what you should take away from this review is that the game is very, very good.
When I played and reviewed Batman: Arkham Asylum, I described it as a perfect blend of what Batman should be; stealthing around and picking enemies off one by one, having a belt chock full of “bat” gadgets and being able to compete against a horde of enemies in hand to hand combat. I didn’t really elaborate much when I wrote the review so let me this it now. Stealthing around is mostly done by swinging from the rafters and then jumping down on individual enemies once you get them alone and knocking them unconscious. However there was a large variety in takedown methods that you could exploit. You could hang from a ledge and pull them over it, you could hang from a gargoyle and yank them up into the air, you could set a small explosive charge on a weak floor or wall, throw a sonic batarang to attract their attention and then blow up the explosive knocking them out. So needless to say it was varied and interesting and if you really wanted to perfect your takedown craft, you could always practice in the challenge maps.
Now onto combat and if you have ever seen a batman movie, you’ll get an idea of what the combat is like. You get surrounded by x number of bad guys and you take them down one by one until you’re the only left standing. The combat itself is very brutal however it does not degenerate into button bashing, rather it requires a bit of timing and finesse in order to keep your combat multiplier up or even remain standing for that matter as the hooded masses can take you down surprisingly easily if you don’t know what you are doing or continuously counter their attacks.
Now a few may be raising their eyebrows and question why I am talking about the combat and stealth from Asylum rather than from City. Well that’s because the developers have cleverly recognised a great thing and simply left it alone for the most part and only giving the already sparking stone a quick polish.
So little has changed in combat and stealth but the locale and story has undergone a drastic change as the game title implies. Instead of being in Arkham Asylum, the game is set in the self titled, Arkham City, a prison area within Gotham (because it’s always a good idea to have a large gathering of criminals in the centre of town with the only thing stopping them being a 3ft cement wall) where Batman gets trapped and needs to save the day from Dr Hugo Strange and a variety of other bad guys including The Joker, Penguin and Mr Freeze. I would like to go into some more detail but I won’t for two reasons; partly because I don’t want to give away any spoilers but mostly because I refuse to try and detail a story that has as much structure to it as a house made of jelly. The Asylum story, whilst being flimsy at the best of times, did at least drive the game properly. City on the other hand is driving the game in the same way a drunk would drive a hovercraft. You never really know what the greatest threat in the game is meant to be. Dr Strange featured prominently in the trailers and he does a bit in the game as well but The Joker keeps popping up when he feels he is no longer the center of attention and the game ends in such a way that if you don’t enthusiastically read Batman comics you’ll be left wondering what the fuck and if you do you’ll be jumping up and down and complaining like a two year old who has had their saucepan helmet taken away. The worst of it comes with the introduction of Catwoman as playable character that people can acquire when you put in a code when purchasing the game. She pops up every now and again at fixed points in the story, has a total story play time of 20 minutes in what is a 10 – 15 hour game and has a way of getting around the city that is horribly clunky and unrefined. It’s something that I had known in advance was going to break the flow of the game as badly as it does, I wouldn’t have bothered.
The city itself where the story takes place has a greater sandbox feel in comparison to its predecessor while attempting to maintain the same atmosphere and while it achieves it to some extend when you go inside buildings and into the sewers, on the surface it doesn’t have the same impact. With any sandbox title the way you get from point A to point B becomes so much more important than with any other game and while putting Batman in a sandbox is a great idea in theory, it doesn’t feel quite right when applied. If the game was the entire city of Gotham rather than just one small subsection of it and you could drive the Batmobile rather than just run and glide everywhere, then it probably would have worked very nicely , but when the area you have to work with is just so small and the way you get around quickly becomes monotonous, it just leads to something quite meh and believe me when I say this, you will be wondering around this city a lot!
There are numerous side quests to complete like solving crimes, protecting political prisoners and capturing other notable albeit lesser known Batman villians like Deadshot, Bane and Zsasz. The Riddler’s puzzles make a comeback for better or worse with even more riddles to solve however rather than having a strict “one per zone or room with the clue to help you” policy as in Asylum, City has them spread out across the entire map and the clues only pop up one at a time and won’t change until you’ve solved the previous one. Fortunately you still have the maps to help you so more often that not you will be solving the riddles through finding the location on the map and pure luck rather than actually solving the riddle. There are also hundreds of question marks to collect as well but these prove to be more annoying than enjoyable because there are just so many. Although at least the highlighting of riddles and questions marks on the map makes a bit more sense. Rather that collecting maps from around the Arkham grounds, you have to interrogate Riddler’s henchmen who are spread around the city and these guys are usually within a cluster of other henchmen and you won’t be able to interrogate them until you knock everyone else out, something which adds an extra challenge when it comes to combat.
But despite my criticisms, these are only small issues in an otherwise excellent game. It’s fun and enjoyable and I’m already playing it through a second time and I feel sorry for all those PC players who don’t have the game yet and will have to choose between it and an obscene number of games that come out following the 11th of November.