Batman: Arkham City Review

Batman: Arkham City is a better, open-world version of Batman: Arkham Asylum. If you decided to skip the asylum game, then continue skipping that and consider this one. If you didn't skip the asylum then skip down to the last few paragraphs.

The gameplay of Arkham City comprises fighting, sneaking, flying, and puzzles.

The fighting remains one of the simpler, more elegant takes on the God of War/Ninja Gaiden/Devil May Cry genre. "X" hits enemies. "Y" stops enemy attacks and hurts their originators. "A," tapped twice, leaps. And "B" dazes. There are some enemies who require simple button combos, but they're introduced to you gradually, giving you enough time to memorize the right button mashings and thus preventing frustration.

Not to say the fighting hasn't changed at all. This time the fights get even bigger (say, twenty enemies at once), and you can interrupt the attacks of multiple opponents at once, often by smashing them into the environment or their friends! It's fun!

The stealthery is also (a bit) deeper. Sometimes enemies will have something they call "thermal vision goggles." What those actually mean gameplay-wise is that you can no longer just swing around, gargoyle to gargoyle, right above the enemies' heads, to remain undetected (which was the dominant strategy that boringified most of Arkham Asylum's sneakiness). Sometimes enemies will lob or launch grenades where they think you are, forcing you to move and maybe accidentally revealing yourself. And because Arkham City is city-like, with tall buildings you can zoom up via your grappling hook, and the smoke pellets you can drop to disorient your enemies, sneaking and escaping the way Batman would feels like you think it should, without taking out millions to make your own Batsuit and killing yourself in attempts at Batmannery.

Which brings us to Flying! And this time, it actually feels like flying! In the first game you could glide down from high places and feel satisfied as you saw Batman's cape winged out. But now! You get that and can fly! You can do it by sling-shotting yourself past the object you're grappling to and repeating this every time you go too low. Or you can leap from a high place, "dive bomb" downwards building up speed, aim back upwards with your new momentum, and repeat. Or both. The game's mechanics are flexibly mixable.

And the boss fights!...are kind of fun this time! They involve much more than Asylum's "leap out of the path of the large charging enemy so he can crash into a wall" style of "boss" battle; that's a mere feature of a many-feature boss battle. And there are a lot more bosses, some of whom can only be encountered via sidequesting.

Speaking of which!

Getting the Riddler trophies isn't nearly as boring this time! (hooray?) The cheap reason why they're not boring is that there are so many trophies (in the form of little green question mark statues) all over the place; you'll keep getting them and their extra XP and unlocking Batman memorabilia at an MMORPG-reward system rate. How they are not MMORPG-like, and thus not merely addictive, is that many of them are simple puzzles and require you to prove your Batmanning skills, such as flying batman or his remote control batarang, here and there, through this and that. And unlike the original game set in the nut house, many of these Riddler trophies aren't obtained merely by unlocking new equipment (although there's plenty of that).

There's only one annoying thing in the new Batman simulation. It is the developer's continued obsession with appealing to a teenage, male audience, the symptoms of which are hypersexualized female characters and cliche-ridden writing of the "let's get this party started" variety. (An example?) The only 'bad' word in the game seems to be "bitch"; it gets repeated a lot due to the contradiction of going for a Teen, ESRB rating and trying to insert vulgarity into common criminal speech. The non-existence of artistic freedom, I bet, explains why so many lines get repeated on the cannot-be-turned-off radio, and why so many trite phrases come from the so-called super-genius villians.

And this is why, if you've already played Arkham Asylum, you probably should skip this one. Everything we liked in the first game was so good that Rocksteady couldn't improve upon it much, and the writing, the improvement of which could have made this one feel fresh, remains stagnant in Appeal-to-Teenage-Boy Land.

The joy the earlier, inferior game gave us came in its elegant, novel Batmanning and the depictions of Gotham's surprisingly interesting psychos. The Batman games' joy of discovery, you Arkham Asylum veterans, you've already enjoyed. The challenge rooms you can unlock in Arkham City you basically played through long ago. The ministories behind the villians you've pretty much read. There's nothing new for you here. Catwoman plays pretty much the same.

9/10

This review is based on the PC version of the game, played with an XBOX 360 controller on "Hard" difficulty.