Batman: Arkham City

After some time with this game now I have found myself wholly impressed. I was a huge fan of the first of Rocksteady's Batman games (Arkham Asylum) having played it from beginning to end on numerous occasions.
Batman Arkham City takes everything that was so great about Asylum and expands upon it immeasurably, then adds a load of new stuff for you enjoyment! Firstly, after a stunning opening sequence the game drops you straight into the action in the heart of a city overrun with criminal masterminds, mindless thugs and a good smattering of doctors, security and police personel who are trying to help bring pockets of order to what is essentially a city in a state of riot.
The beauty of being dropped straight into the action is that you immediately get the impact of the scale of this game - the environment is huge and explorable in a variety of ways. Straight off the bat (sorry) you can run, jump, glide, grappel, slide throughout the city. More and more of Batman's gadgets become available throughout the game allowing for access to the tiniest corners or furthest reaches of Arkham but you are free to explore a vast amount of the city and a good deal of gadgets from minute 1.

For me, the most notable improvements have to be the fact that the larger environment has allowed for side quests to be included. In the first you pretty much went from A to B occasionally stopping to collect riddler trophies. Yes it was fun, but also gave you a fairly linear story within Arkham Asylum. In Arkham city, you have the run of the city, you ARE Batman and whilst there is a strong narrative throughout - you can feel free to help this person, destroy that danger or discover those secrets without ever feeling like you're deviating from what the game wants you to do.

Riddler challenges have been massively improved too! No longer are they all hidden behind destroyable walls and in hard to reach places that you need a specific gadget for. Now they actually challenge you to think logically, or laterally or test your memoery, dexterity etc. They all actually feel like challenges for Batman from the Riddler! Also, the ability to record riddler challenges onto your own map if you can't reach them yet, or don't have time to collect just now etc. is an excellent and welcome addition.

One of the only criticisms I have read about this game is the inclusion of SO many villains that some are reduced to cameo performances rather than fleshed out stories - again, for me this plays into the story world beautifully. Imagine the world of Batman, played to such a scale as a whole city to explore yet only brushing shoulders with one or two villains!??! I feel that the scale demands the number of villains - and again, the games variety means thast some will be playing the role of main antagonist, some will be unlikely ally, some will be chance encounter. Stands to reason really!

Final thought is simply this. This is an outstanding game with many jaw dropping moments! Just remember to download the free Catwoman as a playable character element BEFORE you start playing the main game! It actually slightly changes the game right from the outset, but all in good ways!

Buy, play, enjoy!

Arkham City is unbelievably good. I've played it through five times now and as I've gotten better at it my enjoyment has increased immeasurably. On the first play through I found things like the remote batarang and the Advanced AR training to be infuriating because I thought I'd never master them. However, after plenty of practice and a lot of patience I eventually mastered everything that the game threw at me, and that's when this game becomes a truly rewarding experience. There's just so much to do and so many different ways to do it all. I think it helps if you've played Arkham Asylum first because it prepares you for how to use some of the gadgets and combos already.

The main storyline is fantastic just like last time, but the improvements on Asylum are magnificent. I loved the first game but there were a few things I would have changed, such as being able to keep your gadgets and upgrades for a second play-through. Well you can do that with the Game+ option on here and it's just brilliant because the enemies are tougher to beat but by this time you've sussed out new ways to deal with them.

The side missions are also great fun and provide a welcome distraction. The fact that you can just leave the main storyline for a while and glide round the city solving other crimes makes the whole experience completely immersive. The game makers clearly care passionately about Batman and all the characters and back stories. Even though you can never really be Batman, this is as close as you're ever likely to get.
My final compliment would be to say that this is brilliant value for money. Once you know what you're doing you can play this for weeks without getting bored and it never gets repetitious, but it is totally worth putting in the effort to learn how to use all the gadgets and perform the combo moves etc. This isn't just my favourite game of the year, it's my favourite game ever.

Batman is a paragon of symbology. The cowl, the cape, the searing light of the bat-signal that cuts through the toxic darkness of Gotham's sky. But if you're looking for an icon of Arkham City, then consider the humble grapnel. In Rocksteady's previous Dark Knight spectacular, Arkham Asylum, Batman's grappling hook was an essential tool, needed to fling him to those hard to reach vents and crumbling platforms. But here, in Arkham City, the grapnel is a star, embracing the sprawling chunk of quarantined Gotham that Batman now prowls, catapulting you across its scrum of industrial brick, filth and rampant criminality. It's the only way to travel.

Arkham City is the Asylum doors flung wide open. Former warden Quincy Sharp is now mayor of Gotham, building an electoral campaign on a promise of cleaning up the city streets. His answer is to section off the most run-down part of Gotham, shove all the criminals and super-villains inside the quarantine zone and blow the bridges, before leaving the newly christened Arkham City under the command of mysterious psychiatrist Hugo Strange and letting the gangs do what they may within its walls. Batman, naturally, doesn't trust Sharp's little experiment and facilitates a way inside to find out what the loonies are up to.

The glorious madhouse that Rocksteady built in the first game has spilled into the streets, stretching far and stretching high, verticality and dark skies replacing poky corridors and air ducts. The scope has considerably widened but the detail hasn't suffered, with a remarkable amount of care lavished into the minutiae of every filthy street corner of Arkham City. Torn posters of a better yesterday compete with the stark red and black of Strange's utilitarian regime. The Two-Face occupied courthouse is scarred and charred down one side. The Joker has redecorated the steel mill, balloons, flashing lights and giant flaming clown heads his aesthetic of choice. Crime alley twists behind the Monarch Theatre, snow surrounding the chalk outlines of where the bodies of Bruce Wayne's parents were found murdered, a memorium to death and the birth of the Batman. And looking on it all is the Dark Knight himself, perched on a twisted piece of steel gantry as piercing searchlights lance the sky and gangs patrol the streets below.

It's a terrific example of world-building and stage management, but more than anything else Arkham City is a magnificent playground, built for Batman and his wonderful toys. Traversal is a thrilling pleasure, that improved grapnel catapulting Batman into the night sky, his cape snapping open to allow you to glide over the rooftops towards your destination marked, of course, by the bat-signal. A new dive move allows you to plummet to earth, before swooping back up at the last moment to gain momentum and altitude, not unlike the feather cape in Super Mario World. As unlikely as it may seem to compare the Dark Knight with Nintendo's brightly dressed plumber, Batman's sheer sense of movement offers the same kind of instant gratification and razor-sharp control. The tone and toys may be drastically different, but the sense of pleasure at finding and mastering the tricks and nuances is the same.

What you don't tend to find Mario doing, however, is ramming his elbow into a masked thug's septum. Traversal isn't the only thing that has had a major upgrade since Arkham Asylum, with Batman's free-flow brawling given even more flexibility and show-stopping brutality. In the first game, the combat was a superb representation of Batman's ferocity and power, tinged with that all too human vulnerability. Here it's even better, enhanced by a more complete sense of control and tighter movement. Fresh animations see Batman sweeping between a cluster of enemies, quickly adapting with an arm-snapping grab or knee to the groin depending on positioning, with extra bone-crunching environmental moves as Batman flings a thug headlong into a lamppost. The core control remains devilishly simple with attacks, counters, dodges and a cape-sweeping stun move assigned to the face buttons. However, Batman's gadgets play an even larger part in combat, with the Bat-hook able to disarm a gun-toting assailant and drag him towards you for a vicious clothesline. You can cartwheel and lay down explosive gel as a makeshift mine, while the new Remote Electrical Charge gun can stun an enemy in place with a fizzing ball of electricity. Perfect for crowd control. None of the gadgets interrupt your combo this time around either, with the use of each becoming second nature as you string together a terrifically varied and spectacular range of attacks.

The flexibility in what is ostensibly a very simple system to use is staggering, and there's also more scope in mixing the head on violence with stealthy takedowns. The game's wider context and expanded setting gives you more opportunity to zip up to a gantry and carefully plan out your tactics before sweeping down for either a brief explosion of violence, or a carefully considered route through each victim, silently taking them down one by one. Or perhaps a bit of both. Detective vision, which picks out armed guards and enemy locations, has been slightly downgraded from the first game's overpowered crutch. Now it's a tool you will turn on to survey an area, before switching off and getting down to business.

The individual components of Arkham City are each intricately crafted and beautifully polished, but the greatest sense of achievement for Rocksteady is meshing them into a cohesive whole. All the expansion in the world is worth nothing if you can't fill your creation with meaningful distraction. And Arkham City is bursting at the seams. The main storyline is a ruggedly paced campaign, bouncing Batman between super villains as they each go about their own nefarious agenda in Arkham's sprawl. Rocksteady bat Strange, Two-Face, Joker and Penguin at you in quick succession. And that's just at the start. But while the kind of villain overload was the death knell for a film project like Spider-Man 3, here, in tandem with the perfect setting and precise storytelling, there's an overarching cogency and room to breathe that only a video game like this can provide such an expanded rogue's gallery.

It gives the level designers a wonderful canvas to work with too. Information gathered on the streets of Arkham City often lead Batman to a villain's hideout, often normal municipal buildings twisted into the psyche of its deranged tenant. The Penguin lurks within a natural history museum, with busted dinosaur animatronics whirring alongside glass cabinets filled with skeletons and shelves of military-grade grenade launchers, while the main hall is a frozen over lake patrolled by a great white shark named Tiny. These lairs often fufill a similar role to a dungeon in The Legend of Zelda, stuffed with bad guys and puzzles, enabled by a precisely timed drip feed of new gadgets and abilities. The repeated Nintendo references are no accident, with Rocksteady's level of inventiveness and variation throughout Arkham City reaching a level rarely seen. The draw of the campaign's dogged rollercoaster keeps you fairly locked into the story's trajectory, even as a slew of side-missions sprout up around the city. In fact the game often locks you out of these missions, eager to press you onwards to the story's shocking --if overly abrupt-- finale. This kind of forward momentum makes perfect sense in context, even if it can be marginally irritating in practice.

Once you have completed the campaign, however, Batman returns to the city to take care of his unfinished business. It's unusual for a game to take on a life of its own quite in the way Arkham City does after completion. But with the city open and the pull of the main story gone, it gives you the opportunity to really drink in Rocksteady's creation and tackle the excellent side-missions. The Riddler returns with a telling influence, scattering trophies throughout the huge map and asking you to complete puzzles, hunt out landmarks and find hidden question marks placed with devilish genius. Once you solve enough of his riddles, he will reveal the location of a hostage, trapped in a nefarious environmental puzzle. Batman will save political prisoners within Arkham City from bolshy thugs, investigate murders using forensics within detective mode, and go up against a variety of more subsidiary villains in a raft of cameos and guest appearances.

The most notable guest star, however, is second playable character Catwoman, whose story is threaded within Batman's. Controlling Catwoman is a delight, her lithe quickness a wonderful counterpoint to Batman's hulking strength. The only disappointing aspect of Catwoman's inclusion is, perhaps surprisingly, there's not enough of her, with a handful of short missions acting as palate-cleansers during Batman's investigation. You can take control of her in the separate challenge mode, however, with combat and predator challenges unlocked throughout the game for her and Batman. This is an expanded mode of the first game's challenge rooms, complete with online leaderboard support and modifiers that subtly shift the combat when switched on. There's even a New Game Plus mode available on completion of the story, with different enemy configurations and tougher combat offset by the ability to take all your upgrades into your new campaign.

Now that's a whole lot of game. A wonderful, startlingly complete package tailored for the single player. In these days of multiplayer crowbarred into any old game, it's a relief, a bold statement of intent that Rocksteady have created such a supremely focused but hugely expansive video game. It's a brave, committed, confident piece of work. When Arkham Asylum confounded critics with its brilliance, it marked Rocksteady as a studio to watch. Read more ›