Batman: Arkham City Review
Sometimes reviewers can't see the forest for the trees. When I finished Batman: Arkham City,
I immediately cataloged what I thought it did wrong. It tossed in too
many villains and didn't flesh them out, it clearly tried to
replicate the Scarecrow stuff from the first game and didn't do it as
well, and Batman still moves a bit stiffly when simply walking around.
When I formed the list, I found myself disappointed with the game.
But the days rolled on and I couldn't stop playing -- in fact, I only
wanted to play more. The hundreds of things Batman: Arkham City nails
outweighed my nitpicky problems. I realized Batman: Arkham City is a
brilliant game -- a brilliant game that's even better on PC.
Yes, more than a month after the consoles got Batman: Arkham City, developer Rocksteady's baby has landed on the PC. The core experience is the same as the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions, but the graphics are much sharper and colorful -- though with DX 11 setting turned on the game suffers from some performance issues even while running on a machine with powerful hardware.If you've missed the roughly 1.4 million stories on IGN, Batman: Arkham City picks up months after the events of Asylum. Former Arkham warden Quincy Sharp now reigns as the mayor of Gotham City, and he's moved the bad guys from Blackgate Prison and the inmates from Arkham Asylum to a cordoned off area in the heart of Gotham. This is Arkham City, Dr. Hugo Strange runs it, and Batman's job is to see what the hell is going on inside. It's an interesting story that starts with one of the best openings in modern games. After two years of dreaming about where this sequel would go, Batman: Arkham City delivered and hooked me. That can be said for most of the game.
Fans of the Batman: Arkham Asylum will immediately be at home in Arkham City as Rocksteady took the core gameplay, refined it, and polished it. You brawl with one button, counter with another and leap when you feel like it. Batman's got a slew of new counter attacks -- including the ability to take out several attacking enemies at once -- and the ability to use nearly every gadget in battle with a hot key system. Even though the system can seem simple (that's if you ignore the combos and multipliers) the diversity in the attacks and battles keeps it interesting. I wanted to engage bad guys instead of sneaking past them. Maybe it was the promise of more experience points and the upgrades they unlocked, but it probably had more to do with wanting to see Batman dislocate another elbow.
Rocksteady kept me on my toes by peppering in special enemies. Guys with stun rods, armored outfits and broken bottles all have to be dealt with in very specific ways. I needed to assess threats and engage situations like Batman would. I don't know if I can express how awesome that makes a comic nerd like me feel; after years of hypothesizing how Batman would beat Character X, I now have to do it to survive.Feeling like Batman made Arkham Asylum a must-play, and Arkham City continues that tradition. I felt like I had the upper hand when I walked into a room where the enemies outnumbered me 20 to 1 because I could drop a smoke pellet, use freeze grenades to take enemies out of the game and basically kick ass. Five gunmen with hostages didn't scare me because I knew I could disappear into the shadows to string them up from gargoyles, punch through walls to take them down and glide kick them over railings.
This feeling of empowerment carries over to bosses, which is weird at first but makes sense. No boss in Arkham City really gave me a challenge. In fact, they're all a bit easy. Mr. Freeze had me stumped for a while as once you use an attack on him you can't use it again, but then the Bat-computer just sent me a cheat sheet. (Although, disabling hints would've eliminated this moment.) That specific instance was no fun, but overall, the joy of Batman bosses is the journey to them and not the fight themselves. The Penguin will never
challenge the World's Greatest Detective.
Yes, more than a month after the consoles got Batman: Arkham City, developer Rocksteady's baby has landed on the PC. The core experience is the same as the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions, but the graphics are much sharper and colorful -- though with DX 11 setting turned on the game suffers from some performance issues even while running on a machine with powerful hardware.If you've missed the roughly 1.4 million stories on IGN, Batman: Arkham City picks up months after the events of Asylum. Former Arkham warden Quincy Sharp now reigns as the mayor of Gotham City, and he's moved the bad guys from Blackgate Prison and the inmates from Arkham Asylum to a cordoned off area in the heart of Gotham. This is Arkham City, Dr. Hugo Strange runs it, and Batman's job is to see what the hell is going on inside. It's an interesting story that starts with one of the best openings in modern games. After two years of dreaming about where this sequel would go, Batman: Arkham City delivered and hooked me. That can be said for most of the game.
Fans of the Batman: Arkham Asylum will immediately be at home in Arkham City as Rocksteady took the core gameplay, refined it, and polished it. You brawl with one button, counter with another and leap when you feel like it. Batman's got a slew of new counter attacks -- including the ability to take out several attacking enemies at once -- and the ability to use nearly every gadget in battle with a hot key system. Even though the system can seem simple (that's if you ignore the combos and multipliers) the diversity in the attacks and battles keeps it interesting. I wanted to engage bad guys instead of sneaking past them. Maybe it was the promise of more experience points and the upgrades they unlocked, but it probably had more to do with wanting to see Batman dislocate another elbow.
Rocksteady kept me on my toes by peppering in special enemies. Guys with stun rods, armored outfits and broken bottles all have to be dealt with in very specific ways. I needed to assess threats and engage situations like Batman would. I don't know if I can express how awesome that makes a comic nerd like me feel; after years of hypothesizing how Batman would beat Character X, I now have to do it to survive.Feeling like Batman made Arkham Asylum a must-play, and Arkham City continues that tradition. I felt like I had the upper hand when I walked into a room where the enemies outnumbered me 20 to 1 because I could drop a smoke pellet, use freeze grenades to take enemies out of the game and basically kick ass. Five gunmen with hostages didn't scare me because I knew I could disappear into the shadows to string them up from gargoyles, punch through walls to take them down and glide kick them over railings.
This feeling of empowerment carries over to bosses, which is weird at first but makes sense. No boss in Arkham City really gave me a challenge. In fact, they're all a bit easy. Mr. Freeze had me stumped for a while as once you use an attack on him you can't use it again, but then the Bat-computer just sent me a cheat sheet. (Although, disabling hints would've eliminated this moment.) That specific instance was no fun, but overall, the joy of Batman bosses is the journey to them and not the fight themselves. The Penguin will never
challenge the World's Greatest Detective.
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