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Batman: Arkham City (2011, Playstation 3) Review


FANSERVICE OVERKILL


Also for: Nintendo Switch, OnLive, Playstation 4, Windows, Xbox 360, Xbox One


You have already seen my low review score, and I'm sure you disagree, so allow me to make my case. Batman: Arkham City, the popular sequel to the classic Batman: Arkham Asylum, is ambitious in a lot of misguided ways. It abandons the cramped and eerie corridors of the first game in favor of an open-world approach, and loses much of the pacing and pitch-perfect atmosphere of the original. Developer Rocksteady crams so much content into the game that it completely loses all narrative focus, making the end product come across as a patchwork of fanservice.

In scene after scene, in location after location, the classic cartoon villains parade through the story as if it was the opening ceremony of the Gotham Olympics. We get speaking roles for The Joker, Harley Quinn, The Penguin, The Riddler, Catwoman, Two-Face, Ra's al-Ghul, Ra's al-Ghul's sexy daughter Talia, Mr. Freeze, The Mad Hatter, Solomon Grundy, Hugo Strange, Bane, Clayface, Victor Szasz and Black Mask. Granted, some of them have only cameos or very minor roles, but I've also left out some that I'm not sure I encountered myself.


This bloat was already a minor issue with the first game, but this time it goes overboard. I just can't be sure what I remember correctly or what I merely fabricated in my memory. The sense of overkill drags down the entire game. "Batman in Gotham" was allegedly Rocksteady's design motto, but "more is more", and "never mind it bursting at the seams" must have been posted on the same wall.

As a location, Arkham City itself is a wonderfully harebrained idea. The mayor of Gotham City, Quincy Sharp, and the sinister doctor Hugo Strange have decided to wall off a part of the city to create a super-duper-megaprison. Here the most dangerous villains have free rein, but are not permitted to leave. Naturally, this is now called Arkham City.

Already at the conceptual stage it sounds like a stupid plan predestined to backfire, which renowned millionaire Bruce Wayne points out in the opening cinematic's press conference. This leads to Wayne getting arrested and thrown in there as well, by order of Hugo Strange, and soon thereafter everything promptly backfires. And it is time for Wayne to once more don the Batsuit.


As an open world, Arkham City is another one of those marvels of visual design. It's a relatively small map full of unique details. As I'm quite unversed in Gotham lore, most of the comic book references probably flew over my head, but there are many examples of fascinating visual storytelling; ancient ornaments, graffiti, signs and posters are everywhere in the gothic, decrepit city. By solving sidequests and looking around in detective mode I unlocked a lot of audio recordings and lore tidbits, giving me a chance to catch up with the nerdier Batman fanbase.

But all that comes at a cost. In terms of gameplay, Arkham City itself feels so overdesigned it had me by a chokehold. Maneuvering is a mess, never mind navigating it through visuals alone. For every alleyway there seems to be at least two dead ends. For every horizon there are a thousand smoking chimneys blocking the way forward. Even upgrading Batman's character abilities through the menu system is a maze. 


From a traversal standpoint, the layout of the city is dreadful. The map is of little help as you can never be sure whether a quest marker points to the roof or the interior of a building. And where the heck is the entrance? Some of the toughest challenges in Arkham City is finding the bloody way inside. The middle and lower-middle sections of the city are occupied by a big restricted zone you can't fly through, so you need to circle it in a horseshoe pattern to move across the city. By the end of the game, I had surely gone back and forth across that horseshoe hundreds of times.

To fly around, you use the grappling hook to gain momentum and the cape to glide. People still seem to applaud these new traversal mechanics, but I found them clunky and unreliable, and those two adjectives can summarize a lot about this game. Arkham City utilizes all the good mechanics from the first game, but tweaks them into something unwieldy, and as a sequel it devolves many steps away from the balanced perfection of the first game.


The story, as corny as ever, sends you off on this hodgepodge of errands with an initially vague ulterior motive to back it up. That changes soon enough, when The Joker traps Batman, knocks him out cold and injects him with a lethal virus. Unless Batman finds a cure he will die. The Joker himself is also infected and needs Batman's guaranteed co-operation in finding it - hence the corny setup.

This desperate situation, which brings to mind John Carpenter's classic action movie Escape from New York, doesn't stop the designers from cramming all sorts of distracting side activities down your throat. The city is a mind-numbing cascade of noise, collectibles, enemies, sidequests and different challenges. 

The Riddler's trophies make their return, and they clutter the city with their flashing lights everywhere you look. All the while the deadly disease seems to wait diligently, allowing you to solve simple physics-based puzzles, pursue detective mysteries and clear flight challenges to your heart's content. This must be the most patient death sentence in video game history.


That being said, Arkham City still uses the same glorious mechanics as the predecessor, with smooth combat and predatory sequences aided by a multitude of cool gadgets. But Batman comes frontloaded with a good chunk of them, and acquires even more over the course of the game. In the end you've got so many that it starts to encumber the gameplay, with shortcuts and key combinations that messes with the flow of the melee as well.

Also, the standard enemies feel much tougher. The bigger the bunch, the more I was reduced to simply countering their attacks, and I consequently ended up hammering the counter button for entire fights. Batman's standard attacks become almost redundant, since his animations seem more sluggish - maybe because of the virus? - and the more I progressed, the more I relied on combo moves. Later enemies require quite a complex chain of attacks to be brought down.

But not everything is worse. This time around, the side quests are juicier, more ingrained in the main storyline and come with some well-motivated urgency of their own. They often involve a long chain of unique gameplay segments, ending up with a tumble with one of the supervillains. Although it makes no sense why a mortally ill Batman should waste time with them, I cannot complain on their challenging qualities.

And speaking of supervillains in general, these boss encounters are better this time around, culminating in the fight with Mr. Freeze in the latter half of the storyline. The fight itself felt poorly motivated by the writing, but was mechanically one of the smartest I've seen in any game. It allowed me to make use of all the standard takedown techniques I had acquired throughout the series, and even came with a clever twist I shall not spoil.


This makes me realize something. When juxtaposing this game with the qualities of the first game, they're almost polar opposites. Arkham Asylum was one of my favorite games; an overall triumph with just a few hiccups along the way. Arkham City, on the other hand, is a mess with a few great moments along the way. A couple of good boss fights, a brilliant one, a great story ending and a few cool new gameplay features helped me get through a boring experience.

Had I not known beforehand which game was the sequel, I would perhaps have guessed they were released in the opposite order. City seems like an overly ambitious first attempt at a franchise, with Asylum showing the perfection of a second, refined try from a studio willing to learn from their mistakes and rectify the flaws.

Let me once again point out that I'm no fan of superheroes. All the fanservice is not inherently bad, but it ultimately does nothing for me but distract from what's important; the urgency of the storytelling. Keep in mind that my favorite genre is open world. And yet, I have rarely felt this impatient about getting to the end of a game so rich in content. Now that I have, I feel nothing but relief to say that I'm closing the book on it forever.


[All screenshots taken from www.mobygames.com]

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