Batman: Arkham City (2011)

Definitely a huge improvement over the previous Arkham Asylum game. This game hugely improves on the mechanics:

• The fighting feels very fluent
• The movement feels very fluent and fun
• A lot more interesting gadgets which are also easier to use mid-combat
• Made stealth more feasible (which is definitely an improvement for me)
• The storylines were more engaging
• The setting is a cool concept and ties really well into the story
• A lot of Batman characters make an appearance, if that's important to you
• The Riddler Trophies are fun to collect as a side-thing, however going 100% on them would probably be a pain xD

Overall, would definitely recommend checking this game out. I personally, stayed for the variety in gameplay.

I don't know if it's a product of having played this after Arkham Knight but City is surprisingly much shorter on content, but for the main story and extras. Regardless, it's open world Asylum with a fantastic plot that is sure to appease both comics fans and casuals. It blew my mind back in 2011 and was my favorite superhero game until Spider-man 2018 rolled around.

My playthrough highlights:

Arkham Asylum was a love letter to the world of Batman. A game that was tightly written with impeccable pacing and a well designed game world with a strong sense of exploration.

What does Arkham City do to improve on its predecessor? Just move it to an open world, its what all the big franchises of the time were doing. Does it translate well to the gameplay and atmosphere? Who cares, critics will give it high scores like they did to every open world game back then until we eventually grew sick of them.

The base gameplay is still great, the game handles well, the gadgets are fun to use and the combat is still fluid (although I personally am not a fan of it). The characters look great, but the open world does not. It feels hollow and empty with no memorable features. It is just a bunch of empty rooftops for Batman to swing on. The lack of colour is part of the game's art style, but it lent itself better to an asylum as opposed to an entire city. The bland game world only serves to make the traversal feel tedious, as I'm not exploring but rather just moving to a marker.

Arkham City coasts on the features of the first game and adds a bunch of confusing design choices which include the following:

• Why are there so many Riddler trophies? Where did the Riddler get the time and the resources to place trophies across an entire city, some of which require gadgets that Batman never used before this game?
• Why do I need to hold LB on Riddler trophies to tag them on my map? Can't I just scan over them?
• Why are most of the side missions progressed through random encounters? Am I expected to aimlessly traverse the open world until they pop up? By the time the game was done I had no progress on the Deadshot, Political Prisoners and Identity Thief side quests.
• Why do I need to interrogate a random thug to get the Riddler icons on my map? Why do the Riddler side quests start spawning only if I randomly decided to visit an previous visited area?
• Why do I play as Catwoman only 3 times? Why dedicate a chunk of the open world to a character I only play as 3 times in the story? The side quests in the game all feel like pointless busywork, with their sole purpose being to encourage you to fly around the bland open world from Point A to Point B with no fast travel to at least make your life easier.

There are other bizarre design choices but usually bad gameplay is compensated by a good story. Arkham City's story is solid for the first half, but at the halfway point the entire story stops making logical sense. Why does Mr. Freeze fight Batman who was going to save his wife anyway? What was the point of the Ras Al Ghul plot twist if he was going to be taken out less than two minutes later in a cutscene? Why didn't the Joker heal himself with the cure while he had Talia captive? Why go through all the trouble to trick Batman, his henchmen and by extension the audience into thinking he was healed all this time? Why is the final boss Clayface, who had no screen time for the entire game?

I tried to wrap my head around these nonsensical story decisions and I realized that the story for this game was likely written secondary to the game. The game goes to great lengths to make sure that you aren't fighting the same enemies as the first game. Why are you fighting Mr. Freeze? Because you didn't fight him in the first game. Why is the final boss fight Clayface? Because you fought Joker as the final boss in the first game. Why do you fight Two Face, Penguin and Ras Al Ghul? Because they weren't in the first game. Why is there no fight with Ras Al Ghul after the twist? Because you fought him already in this game. The plot is in service to the gameplay and not the other way around, and when you consider that the gameplay itself is tedious it makes these flaws all the more apparent.

In Arkham Asylum every moment seemed to have a purpose. It wasn't longer than it needed to be. Arkham City feels like the devs tried to cram as much Batman as possible into one game to the point where it feels bloated. Arkham City's base story goes on for 3 hours longer than it needed to and a more compact story would've done the game wonders.

People really need to lose the nostalgia glasses. Arkham City was great for the time, but we have moved past big open world games with a bunch of icons on a map as the peak of gaming. Games like Arkham City, Assassin's Creed Brotherhood and Burnout Paradise have all aged poorly.

Intro

This is third-person action game that mixes brawling, puzzles and platforming.

The Good

• I'm a child of the 80s so Kevin Conroy is the Batman to me.
• Obviously Mark Hamill is the Joker as well.
• Overhearing people's conversations is fun.
• It doesn't start out as a 3 hour tutorial like Arkham Asylum.

The Bad

• The city looks incredibly fake and unappealing.
• I don't care for their moronic story.
• Batman looks awful. I really hate this roided up version.
• You have to do stunts to get certain upgrades.
• Shitty checkpoints that make you replay too much of the game.

The Ugly

I've never felt as trapped in an open-world game. It just doesn't invite me to explore , especially because pretty much the only reward is XP. Arkham City looks nothing like a real place. In combination with the riddler crap that is all over the place it makes you feel like you're in a fancy game show.

I just don't care for the combat. I loved Shadow of Mordor but for some reason the Batman games just don't do it for me combat-wise. It doesn't help that so many things (like dodging) require double tapping. That feels completely unnatural to me.

It tricks you into thinking it will let you play the game, then it quickly devolves into the same shitty Arkham Asylum crap. Every problem only has a single solution, creativity is anathema to the devs. It's just so incredibly lame. They give you all these tools but completely pre-determine how and when you can use them. Obviously not every game can be Deus Ex, but this surely could have been at least marginally less like an obstacle course.

Conclusion

If someone says "Jump!" and you say "What combination of buttons do i have to press, master?" this is the game for you.

Playing this game immediately after Asylum resulted in the sameness getting a little grating towards the end. The combat system is still fluid and fun but, at times, can be overwhelmed. When fighting large gangs of thugs that are armed in various ways it can often be impossible to have the correct combat response, someone'll get you! But, that's not terribly bad and honestly the groups big enough for that only happen a handful of times.

It's fun to explore the prison/city, to do a bit of murder investigation side plots, and the main plot line is fun and ridiculous, but I wasn't too keen on the Catwoman bits. Harley Quinn's Revenge was a little lackluster too, in my opinion. This marks two games in a row where the big final boss is just "lots of dudes" instead of a cool, well crafted boss fight like Mr. Freeze or the big electric dude.

That said, I think it's still an improvement over Asylum and I'll be putting Batman down for a bit before moving on to Arkham Knight!

This game's plot is hilarious nonsensical, but it doesn't matter because this is a game about batmaning around a city populated with dumb, punchable henchmans. The combat is solid, as expected from an Arkham Asylum sequel, with some interesting variation. But what sells the deal is the traversing. Soaring through the run-down prison neighbourhoods is a blast, even if the controls feel somewhat inadequate for precision platforming.

The main downside are the Catwoman missions which add absolutely nothing to the story, or the characters or the gameplay. The fight with Two-Face at the end it's a terrible epilogue for what's supposed to be a powerful and emotional ending.