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Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment

Developer: Rocksteady Studios

Platforms: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC

Release Date: October 18, 2011

Arkham City starts with Bruce Wayne being captured by Hugo Strange and in his escape he finds himself in the half of Gotham City that has been taken over by the inmates of Arkham Asylum.  With a quick drop by Alfred Bruce Wayne suits up and once again takes on his role as Batman.

Use all his gadgets and stealth abilities to figure out what is happening in Arkham City, and who the vile villain is behind the madness!

With appearances from some of the most iconic Batman villains of all time you are sure to be on the edge of your seat as you battle your way through the likes of Joker, Riddler, Two-Face, and etc.

Functionality:

The controls for this game are based off the original Batman: Arkham Asylum title.  If you haven’t played that game, which I would highly recommend you try, than the best way to describe the controls is by comparing the combat with God of War.  The only real difference is that instead of a heavy attack the top key (triangle for PS3 and Y for Xbox 360) is your counter button.

With these controls your main fighting methods, when dealing up c lose and personal, will be to button smash X (xbox 360) continuously with the occasional Y when a villain trys to lay a punch on you.  The counter attack becomes a main feature with this game so you should expect to use it a lot and with that said there are some occasional issues with this.  My fair warning is that, with the xbox and PS3 versions of Arkham City, there are occasions when the game wont register your counter move properly.

Counter move issues: the counter move in Batman allows him to be able to counter anywhere between 1-3 enemies at a single time!  While this is awesome as a concept, and when working properly looks amazing, there are times in the game when it will not quite register the counter move.  I have had quite a few moments where it will do a two person counter move but only grab one of the baddies, this leaves the remain guy free to lay his punch on you.  Along with that there are moments when Batman will not jump out of an animation fast enough to process the counter that you had registered.

Now while this is not a huge issue that prevents the game to be playable it is still interesting that it exists only in the main story mode.  My belief is that since this game is set up as a big open world and does very very few loading sequences, almost none to be exact, the game runs into buffering issues that may result in combat issues.

The reason this seems like it could be the case is that the designated loaded areas in the games Challenge Maps have absolutely no issues with countering or combat.  This could be due to the fact that these areas are much smaller and able to be fully loaded.  My recommendation may be to just install the game on your system, that way you can cut down on load times.

The only other issue I had discovered with Arkham City is the method of gadget swapping.  Since you use directional keypads to swap weapons it ends up feeling very insensitive to your touch and a lot of the time you will end up not pulling out the right gadget you want.  This is mainly related to any gadgets that are on  the upper-left, upper-right, bottom-left, and bottom-right of the key mapping.

Now what would have been more useful would be a radial map, that way you can easily select your gadgets with an analog stick.  Or allow the player to set their gadgets to specific key mapping areas.  That way you can decide out what gadgets you want easier access.

Don’t take this too hard though, I mean this is a small issue but is in no way an issue that will ruin your gaming experience.  All it does is become at times annoying when you are trying to pull out your hacking device or whatnot to get past a pesky door.

Besides combat and gadgets Arkham City has stepped up in Batman’s hover abilities.  Now you will be able to explore almost any nook and cranny of Arkham City as you fly over top, especially if you spend a little time with the AR training missions and unlock your bat claw boost.  It is very impressive the closeness to detail that Rocksteady had done to make Arkaham City really seem like a real run down city with terror on every corner.

I had only wished Batman would learn how to get passed barbed wire fences…

With all that said I would like to say that the controls have a form of naturalness to them, but that could also be because I had played the first title.  The only issue with this game is that there isn’t a lot of training at the initial start of the game, which is slightly unfortunate when you find yourself at the top of a building trying to piece together the proper way to glide for an optimal distance.

Now the overall HUD for the game is very understated, you have your health and armor bar on the top left and a compass in the top middle.  It is very simple and works to keep all the unimportant information out of your viewing as your travel Arkham City.

Presentation:

The graphics are great, they are a very nice step from the original game.  The entire look of Arkham City is dark and in chaos, throughout the city there is corruption and violence.  This is kept as the main focus point as you travel looking for answers, and it is done very very well.

What is really impressive is how smooth the game feels as you travel from one side to the other.  Since there is no load times through the city you really are kept with the feeling of a big city with a lot of stuff going on.  Now I have said several times that there are little to no load times, let me explain.

For this game all the exploration you do above ground there are no loading sequences to go through.  The only time the game will do a quick load is transitions from the exterior to interior, so if you go into a designated building or a sewer.  That is it.  So yes in reality you will never have to worry about flying across Arkham and randomly see your character freeze in midair as small bat symbol appears in the bottom right spinning.

Along with the environment the main characters have been designed extremely well.  Each character seems to look and feel like they should, and by that I mean they feel like their comic book counter parts (sorry Nolan but I am not comparing this your movie, just yet…).

The only character I had a little difficulty with was Two-Face.  The main reason is that the overall look was too much like a ripped apart man and that made him seem a bit unthreatening.  When you start messing with the look of Two-Face and present the look of half the body burned to the interior tissues you lose that look of strength.  But not just that you also have an issue with how that side of his body is rendered.  It looks too plastic, too shiny, and less dark and scary.

But Two-Face isn’t the only character who will receive punishment.  In keeping with the original game, as you progress Batman will start to show more and more tears throughout his bat suit.  This adds a nice progression for the character, making it really feel like he is enduring harsh circumstances.  My only wish is that they would have shown suit upgrades.  Since you are able to add exp points to Batman’s suit defense it would have been nice to see a slight change in the fabric or another piece of armor added.

If you find yourself not liking the way batman looks, don’t worry, once you beat the game you will unlock new game + (something all games should have).  This mode will allow you to up the difficulty, keep your gadgets, and wear any alternate costumes you unlocked.  My personal favorite costume was the animated series Batman, nothing like running around in a crisp cartoon form foiling crime.

Atmosphere:

The soundtrack is great but at times seems to make your mind go elsewhere.  While it really captures the environment and the entire Batman series I found myself wondering if maybe the composer was looking for inspiration in too many places.

Throughout the game you will find sounds that will bring you back to the Tim Burton Batman movies (Batman and Batman Returns, the only good ones in that set of four).  While at other moments you will have flashes of the newer movies as well.  But what is interesting is that there are small tid bit sounds that push in a reminder of mass effect.

This is noticed whenever Batman gets a new gadget and needs to analyze it.  The background music at that moment feels like your back on the Normandy with Commander Shepard fending off Geth and Reapers.

But all this will remain in the back of your mind with the awesome gameplay and incredibly environment that is Arkham City.

Plot:

Now the important thing, plot.  I am going to be as brief as possible because I don’t want to give away anything that will ruin you experience with the game.

Batman: Arkham City has a pretty good and decently defined direction.  The only issues I had was that I felt the game wasn’t sure what it really wanted to focus on.  From the trailers you would imagine that the game will focus on Hugo Strange and that all the other characters will have equal parts in the game, this is incorrect.

The game will largely center on a third party, I will not tell you who it is, that is controlling all of what happens in and too Arkahm City.  You will run into a lot of the other characters that have been mentioned to be in the game, people like Mr. Freeze and Penguin.  But the parts that each character plays, in the game, is not equal and at many moments you will find yourself wanting more from them.

One issue I found was that the side missions could become kind of boring and uninteresting.  This is unfortunate because that is the only real appearance for some of the Batman villains.  One particular mission is that you fly from pay phone to pay phone, under a timed basis, to listen to Zsasz as you try to trace his call.  At the end of the day it was just flying from one point to one point to trace a call for an altogether underwhelming confrontation.

The biggest disappointment for me was how quick the Mr. Freeze story line was, I was hoping for a lot more indepth issues between Freeze and Batman.  Alas I was disappointed for there was only 2-3 missions for him.

But here are fingers crossed that they will release a lot of DLC to help boost side missions with all the other characters in the game.

Along with this I will say that the ending was a little bit of a letdown.  While it made perfect sense to me and matched the story, I found myself wondering if this truly is the last Batman game to include a very key player in the franchise.  (Hopefully this is clear yet vague enough not to spoil your experience)

All in all I would say the story is good, great on the standards of a super hero video game.  But there should have been a bit more investment on side missions, make them mean something.

Legacy Rating:

Will this game last through time? I feel that there are a lot of great qualities with this title but it is still going to be overshadowed by its predecessor.  Arkham Asylum will be the game that we shall remember as the first time in a long time that super heroes can have great games.  While Arkham City offers a fun and engaging experience, it just doesn’t do enough to out step Arkham Asylum

How does it compare with other games? The only real game to compare it to is Arkham Asylum, this is because the way the game is structured is very unique.  With that said the only real thing I can tell you is that both game are worth playing equally, I loved Asylum and very much enjoyed Arkham City.  They are great games and offer an excellent experience.  The only issue I found between the two was that Asylum might have a more focused plot than Arkham City, which does seem to make it more memorable in my mind.

Buy or rent?  I would say buy.  Especially if you are looking for a fun game that will help you forget the horrible moments of Dark Souls…  Batman: Arkham City offers a great experience to gamers who are looking to play as one of their favorite super heroes as he brings justice to the unjust.  Now if only they could make an awesome Superman game…