Studio: Rocksteady/Warner Bros
PEGI Rating: 15
Number of players on one console: 1
Online support: Only leaderboards
System Link Support: None
Online multiplayer: None
In-game audio: Dolby Digital 5.1 on the Xbox 360, plus DTS and LPCM 5.1 on the PS3.
Click here to buy this game for the Xbox 360
Click here to buy this game for the PS3
Game synopsis
Bruce Wayne is arrested and thrown into Arkham prison – a section of Gotham City hived off ‘Escape From New York’ style into a huge penitentiary. After narrowly escaping the clutches of the Penguin, he manages to get his Batsuit flown in and starts to investigate what sinister plots the various nefarious souls in the prison are cooking up.
Gameplay
It is, of course, customary for a sequel to go bigger and throw in more diversity than its predecessor. But even knowing that, and even though the already large and entirely brilliant Arkham Asylum still seems so remarkably fresh in our memories, we were still blown away by the sheer scale of Rocksteady’s ambitions with Batman: Arkham City.
For starters, where once you only had a small island and a few large buildings to play in, here you’ve got a large chunk of a living, breathing city, complete with different boroughs and zones, each with their own distinct look and large buildings to explore. So large is Arkham City’s ‘playground’, in fact, that the special ‘combat puzzle rooms’ that were really the focus of Arkham Asylum now only feel like one small but lovely side dish.
Batman: Arkham City - This might sting a bit.
Also, where once you had one main adversary (the Joker) with a few ‘bit part’ appearances by other noteworthy foes from Batman lore, now you have various key foes all deeply involved in the game’s narrative, each with their own ‘grand schemes’. In fact, Hugo Strange, the Joker and The Penguin are going up against each other in a bid for control of Arkham City’s felon-filled streets – though of course, they do also share a common goal of wanting to get rid of Batman.
Then there’s the roster of side missions. For instance, you have to try to track down enough clues to identify a brutal serial killer stalking Arkham City’s population and, um, cutting their faces off. Or you can follow Victor Zzasz’s sick phone call trail in a bid to find him before he starts adding more victim ‘notches’ to his body. Or you can help Bane track down canisters of Titan. Or you can try to find and confront a mysterious figure who appears to be watching you at all times and who leaves curious glyphs on the floor whenever you confront him.
Or, most intimidatingly of all, you can try and solve enough of the puzzles and collect enough of the trophies left all over Arkham City by the Riddler to save a group of hostages he’s taken for no other purpose than to torment his hated Caped Crusader foe.
To give you an idea of the scale of the game, there are 400 Riddler challenges to find and solve, scattered both inside the game’s many buildings and all over its exterior streets and walls. They’re varied too, taking in everything from completing specific combat or action challenges to scanning particular landmarks; figuring out how to hit multiple switches at speed; bursting Joker balloons scattered around the city; shooting security cameras; or managing to press a series of pressure pads in quick enough succession and/or the right order. There’s more gameplay and time involved in solving these riddles alone than many games give you in total.
Batman: Arkham City - Thug chin, meet cat boot.
The already remarkably sophisticated combat system found in Arkham Asylum has been expanded for Arkham City too, with more moves, more rewards for putting together combat combis, and more technique upgrades to earn as you ‘level up’ your character.
Then there are Batman’s gadgets, which are much more numerous and fun than they were in Arkham Asylum, adding many more options to your combat style as well as allowing Rocksteady to come up with a more diverse set of puzzles to tease your brain with.
As if all this wasn’t enough, Rocksteady has even introduced a second playable character with her own missions to play: Catwoman. As well as providing some arguably welcome relief from Batman’s relentless moodiness, Catwoman also introduces yet more gadgets and combat styles to the game’s already dizzying mix.
Actually, initially it feels as if there’s too much going on in Arkham City. For where Arkham Asylum did a brilliant job of holding your hand through your ever-growing list of abilities and ‘tools’ without the process feeling forced, Arkham City’s early stages require you to try and figure out an awful lot of the controls and options for yourself. The result is that for two or three hours your absorption in the game is slightly hindered by the frustrations of wrestling with the interface.
In fact, we’re going to come clean and say that even having played the game for in excess of 35 hours so far, we’re still not by any means entirely au fait with all the game’s controls. Particularly intimidating is the bewildering amount of special move and equipment-based options available in combat. We know for a fact that despite finishing the game and getting more than 350 of the Riddler’s 400 riddles, we’ve probably used – consistently, at least – no more than 50% of the potential combat options.
Batman: Arkham City - Nice lipstick, shame about the face.
To be fair, the game does offer you the option to always receive an onscreen prompt when you fulfill the necessary criteria to use the special moves. But even with all these prompts set to ‘on’, we tended to stick for the most part with the sort of routines that always seemed to work for us – except during the occasional boss battle where you’re forced to think out of the box.
There’s a practical reason we didn’t fully explore the game’s combat capabilities, too. Namely that selecting some of Batman’s tools is a chore, thanks to the way some of them are assigned to the diagonal parts of the ‘D-Pad’. It’s tricky enough selecting tools set to the diagonals even when you’re not in the heat of battle, so you can imagine how quickly fed up you get with trying to get the right tool selected in real time while some armour-clad brute is smacking seven shades of bat guano out of you.
There are even a few combat techniques that require you to completely adjust your hold on the joystick to produce a necessary button combination – not something that might bother fans of serious fighting games, perhaps, but quite a distraction and potential frustration for most other folk.
The upside to this, of course, is that if you DO manage to pull off a particularly complicated combi of moves, you feel pretty damn pleased with yourself. It’s also a great way of sorting the gaming men from the gaming boys, especially when you try to translate the ‘skills’ you’ve mastered in the main campaign into a collection of specially designed combat challenge rooms. The fact that you can access universal leaderboards for these individual challenges is a brilliant if brutal way of giving well-deserved bragging rights to people who really devote themselves to mastering Batman’s combat techniques. Though obviously these leaderboards tend to make the rest of us mere fighting game mortals feel like gaming peasants.
If you’re starting to feel concerned that your lack of skills might dent your enjoyment of Arkham City, though, chill. For even if you’re not very adept at using the full range of Batman’s combat options, combat still feels super slick and satisfying – even more so than it was with the Arkham Asylum, in fact.
Batman: Arkham City - The game's detective mode shows Mr Freeze in a whole new light.
One last negative effect of the complexity available during combat when playing as Batman, though, is that it makes the sections you play as Catwoman feel rather limited by comparison, as she only has a handful of the toys and tactics available to her bat-based ‘colleague’.
Hopefully by now you’ve twigged that Batman: Arkham City gives you an almost overwhelming amount of things to do in its beautiful and large Arkham City sandbox. Which gets it off to a great start. But where the game goes from just being busy and fun into being something of a classic is with the way its manages to integrate really compelling characters and a strong, multi-threaded story into the ‘free play’ mechanic. The draw to get to the next quip from the Joker or sick ‘joke’ from The Penguin is always strong, and the main storyline is big enough to give the game constant focus. Even the side characters are painted strongly enough to feel compelling attractions, rather than just being something for manic completists to worry about.
That said, there are one or two mis-steps along the way. A handful of the main story missions feel very contrived; basic ‘fetch and carry’ jobs clearly just added in to make the campaign last longer rather than genuinely propelling the story along. It also feels a bit jarring when failing to answer one of Zzasz’s phone calls within the set time limit results in an immediate ‘game over’, rather than delivering the palpable consequence of an innocent victim being killed, with all the guilt that might have inspired.
Batman: Arkham City - Falling with style.
But overall the sheer flare of the script and the general excellence of the voice acting (aside, perhaps, from the occasionally over-taciturn Batman himself) ensure that the game has an over-arcing sense of atmosphere and unity that holds everything together quite beautifully. No mean feat given that it’s hard to think of another game released recently that offers so much sheer gameplay variety.
The last thing to cover here concerns the game’s longevity. In terms of your first playthrough, you could probably rattle through the campaign in around 13-15 hours if you have some solid skills and experience from the first Batman game. But if you do the right thing and get involved with the side missions as well, especially if you become as obsessed with trying to get all the Riddler bits and bobs as we have, then you can easily double that basic campaign time. What’s more, the game lets you carry on solving riddles and pursuing secondary storylines even after you’ve complete the main story.
Completing the game also opens up a new ‘Plus’ campaign mode that lets you start again with all your gadgets already equipped, but with enemies prepped to attack you in much more deadly patterns.
Outside of the main campaign you get both ‘stealth’ and ‘combat’ special challenge rooms with which to hone your skills and make an impact on global leaderboards. These get increasingly difficult, and can take up many more hours of your time if you get into completing them all (though in our case, we don’t anticipate that we’ll ever be able to complete all the combat challenges, at least to ‘gold’ standard’).
There’s a new challenge mode too, that lets you add modifiers to each challenge such as time limits, temporary ‘invincible auras’ around some enemies, and a replenishing health bar for yourself.
We have to say that personally the enormous size of the main game world and its myriad challenges was such that we weren’t drawn to the challenge rooms as much as we were with Arkham Asylum. And aside from a brief try out for this review, we didn’t really feel inclined to play through the whole game again on its harder difficulty setting, given that it’s ultimately the strength of the story that made our first play through so compelling. But still, you certainly can’t accuse Arkham City of selling you short.
