Batman: Arkham City Review

PROS

• It's Batman
• Diverse Gadgets
• Good Stealth Gameplay
• Smooth Gameplay
• Includes Many Batman Villians
• Conspiracies
• Good Level Up System

CONS

• Not The Smartest AI
• Side Quests With No Motivation To Do Them
• Boring Boss Fights
• Sandbox Doesn't Have Much Of A Point
• Story Lacks Drive

Recommended For:

Anyone who's played Arkham Asylum, people who like melee combat, Batman fans.

Not Recommended For:

People who don't like stealth gameplay forced upon them, people who don't like open world games.  If you haven't played Arkham Asylum yet, I also recommend you play it first.

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Batman Arkham City is the sequel to the famous and loved Arkham Asylum, but you already knew that didn’t you?  I’m going to start this review off by saying I didn’t beat Arkham Asylum, I played it for a few hours and….well never got around to playing more.  Now that that’s out of the way, the game’s main plot is that instead of there being an Asylum, a nice chunk of the Gotham Slums was bordered off and all criminals are essentially left to do whatever they wish inside, thus, Arkham City.  The game starts off by Bruce getting taken by the police, and then thrown into Arkham City, he hears about this thing called “Protocol 10” and like a good superhero decides to go and investigate instead of simply leaving.  At the beginning of the game you play as Bruce without the batsuit, but one thing that stuck out to me was that seeing him without the suit and still jumping 2 meters high and dashing around like a track star didn’t seem to fit with a human character, it seemed too super human.  I know he’s batman, but I think they should have toned it down and tried to portray him as a human a little bit better.

If you played Asylum then you’ll be pleased to know that the core gameplay hasn’t changed much, except that it’s a sandbox of course.  It has all the stealth elements such as swinging from gargoyles, ground vents, areal attacks and the lot of it.  Except the AI seems rather stupid, while it does make stealth easier, I think it would have made it an overall better experience if they could have made the AI smarter.  Although I do give the game credit, that in the last hour of the main story the AI does get the idea of shooting down the gargoyles that Batman sits on…but only in the last hour, and I don’t really see why they would decided to make the AI smarter in the end of the game instead of giving them all the same…common sense.

Now the translations of a non-sandbox game to a sandbox game always requires some gameplay changes, and while they clearly did a good job of it, I don’t think the overall structure of the game works as well as it did in Asylum.  Asylum’s linearity actually helped the game in my opinion, and the sandbox in Arkham City almost seems like an unnecessary addition.  Yes traveling around the city with the bat-claw and zipline is fun for a while, but after a little bit it just seems like the developers tried to make the game appear more vast, without the actual need to do so.  I think it may have actually been better if they made it more linear.  In the main story you only deal with a handful of villains, and the rest are a part of side quests. 

Making the majority of villains optional ultimately limits the overall story of the game.  If the game had you deal with more villains in the main story, there would have been a lot more places for the development team to implement more unique gameplay elements.  While Joker is great, he seems to really overstay his welcome by the end of the game.  Also, once I beat the game, I really didn’t have any reason to complete the side quests anyway.  Collecting all the Riddler puzzles seemed like a pointless hassle, and ultimately I don’t see the appeal of the other small side quests.  Implementing the majority of villains into the main story would have really expanded the game as a whole since there would be many more directions for the plot to go.

Speaking of plot, it didn’t really drive me all that much, since I didn’t have any motivation in the first place.  I think that a lot of it had to do with batman’s ideals, but those aren’t my ideals so ultimately I end up getting bored half-way through the game.  While the side quests do offer something else to do, it would have been better if they were used to make the main story more diverse.  Now I think they did try to add more gameplay with the addition of Cat Woman, except I got the game from Gamefly so I wasn’t able to play as her.  While I understand giving additional content to people who buy the game new, having a specific part of the game locked which includes its own gameplay and story really isn’t excusable in my book.  Ultimately that limits the game experience as a whole which doesn’t seem like an incentive for buying new, but more like a punishment for those who rent it, which really is a problem in the industry.

The game does have a nice assortment of boss fights, but they seem too simple.  At the beginning of the boss fight you usually get an obvious clue as to what device to use, and generally you just have to use that device over and over again until their health bar goes down, so I think they could’ve tried to make more “multi-stage” boss fights, and also let the player figure out what to do.  There was one boss fight which I actually found rather entertaining, you could ultimately use any way you want to try and take him down, while each attack made his health go down, it also made him realize what you were doing, so you couldn’t use the same tactic twice on him, I wish all the boss fights were like that, because it gave the player a sense of control and strategy.

Now I’m not saying Arkham City is bad, it’s actually a rather good game, it’s just it wasn’t executed as well as it could’ve been, and I believe turning the game into a sandbox actually limited the game in the long run.  The game has great gameplay overall, some interesting characters and with the leveling up and new gadgets you get throughout the story, it introduces new gameplay mechanics along the way so it’s still a fun experience, just not as fun as it could be.  It seems like they ultimately wanted to try and expand the batman universe within this game, and they actually did a rather good job of it, but it doesn’t appeal and doesn’t give enough incentive to people who aren’t specifically Batman fans, like myself.