Game review: Batman: Arkham City -- 8.5 out of 10

Just like it’s predecessor, Arkham City knocked it out of the park. If Arkham Asylum is a very good game, then Arkham City is a great one. It takes everything about Asylum and builds on it to make it even better.

The writing for the game was top notch; both in plot and in dialogue. The voice acting, particularly by Mark Hamill and Nolan North, complemented it perfectly. On more than one occasion, a funny remark delivered masterfully by Hamill as the Joker would make me chuckle or smirk — nobody can (or will) voice the Joker like Hamill. Nolan North’s voice (the voice actor of Nathan Drake, the personality spheres in Portal 2, and lots of voices in Arkham City) is everywhere, and he did a great job in every character. The plot has lots of twists in it but isn’t hard to follow. The large twist at the end is particularly well done — I did not see it coming at all.

The story did seem to try and squeeze as many villains in as possible, a point that will satisfy Batman fans, but maybe crowded the story just a little. The part they wrote for Catwoman seemed too easy of an angle on the character: lots of cat puns, acting slutty, etc. I mean, come on, look at that. Other than in one section of the game where she has ambiguous romantic feelings toward Batman, she’s very one dimensional. To me, is a real bummer because I think Catwoman can be a very interesting character. Your move, Anne Hathaway.

Gameplay is very similar to Asylum, but with various additions and changes. Flying around the city is very fun. When you learn the dive-bomb/glide technique, it makes traveling in the game faster, more fun and feel more like you’re actually Batman. Hard to explain exactly, but it’s awesome. Just being able to roam around the city and come across groups of dudes to beat up is really cool. They’ll taunt you from the streets saying shit like “COME GET US, BATFREAK”, and I admit a few times I was convinced to oblige them and lay the smack down.

The typical enemies you encounter along the city are underlings of a certain villain’s gang: Penguin, Joker, Two-Face and the like. One main difference of these enemies though is that they the groups of them are peppered with ‘special’ enemies that have a specific attribute — one or two thugs in the group will have a knife that has to be dodged or a riot shield they’ll try to bash Batman with, for example. Accounting for these attributes adds a little more variety to the general combat than Asylum had. Another addition that mixed up the gameplay was the Riddler’s spies in the groups of thugs; if you knocked out every other thug in the group but this spy, you could choose to ‘interrogate’ him about the Riddler and get extra XP and unlock some concept art or other bonuses. Having to fight the enemies in a specific order was something small that added another dimension to the fights. I doubt many people will think this is as cool as I do, but whatever.

Maybe I’m inept, but I found some of the moves in the game hard to execute. The blade dodge takedown in particular I found completely impossible and terribly frustrating to do consistently. The Drive Bomb/Shockwave thing only worked if you started from a really high point and, because of that fact, I probably used it twice in the whole game. No big deal, but I wouldn’t have spent the XP bonus on it if I knew it was only going to work from super-high falls. The Batclaw Disarm upgrade, however, is very handy and I used it a lot.

Rocksteady Studios only really has these Batman games to mention for themselves, but I’m excited to see what they’ll do in the future. They should probably move onto another franchise after this game, though — I doubt they could go that much further with it. It seems that they have a caring philosophy in their game making, and it shows in these Batman games. Two thumbs up. I really enjoyed playing it.

P.S. — Total playtime was probably around 9-12 hours.

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Posted by Thane on 04/11/11 08:35 AM
in gaming, game reviews