Grand Theft Arkham City

Following up a hit videogame can be a daunting task for publishers. One needs to push the envelope with new features without losing touch with what worked the first time around (games like Bioshock 2 end up as a minor disappointment after being too much like the first go round. No one wants to buy the same game twice, especially at $60 a whack). Add in an iconic protagonist like BATMAN, and publisher Rocksteady had a tough road ahead.

Luckily, the developers up their game and improve on the first effort in every facet.

This time around Batman’s been thrust into Arkham City. With prisons unable to house the massive criminal element of Gotham, a section of the city has been walled off in order to incarcerate the crooks. Under 24 hour surveillance, criminals fend for themselves and all the major Batman baddies-Joker, the Riddler, Two Face, The Penguin to just scratch the surface-are setting up their fiefdoms inside the city’s walls. The prison is run by Dr. Hugo Strange, a mysterious genius made all the more dangerous by his knowledge that Bruce Wayne is Batman. It’s up to you to figure out his scheme, clear Bruce Wayne’s name and get out alive. No character in comics enjoys a better rouges gallery, and AC takes full advantage of all the villains at its disposal. 

The game looks and sounds beautiful. It’s more like an interactive animated film that a video game. For many fans Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill are the iconic voices of Batman and Joker, and if this is indeed Hamill’s swan song voicing the Clown Prince of Crime, he’s gone out on a high note.   Character models are detailed and instantly recognizable. Whether you are cracking street thug skulls together of gliding above the rooftops your movements as Batman are fluid and easy to control.  For a massive environment, Arkham City looks stunning. The dilapidated structures are insanely detailed, putting to shame the sometimes bland, square structures found in open-world games. Harsh neon lighting adds flair reminiscent of the Schumacher films to the city, but instead of providing a clean, cartoonish sheen, they put the grime and filth under a microscope.

What Arkham City does best is making the player feel like he is indeed the Goddamn Batman. From detective work, the wonderful gadgetry to the fear the Batman instills in cowardly crooks, AC nails the experience. Combat is simple. Like the first game, it involves easy button presses for striking out and countering attacker’s moves. The key is stringing together flawless moves on after another. The “Detective Mode” from the first game returns, and along with the arsenal of gadgets at your disposal, it helps take down rooms full of armed thugs by a variety of means. As you gain experience, new gadgets and maneuvers become available to use. Gliding and the Batclaw make it easy to zip around Arkham. In thirty years of playing video games, no other game has ever come close to making me feel like an utter badass.  If you've ever played a game where your supposed tough guy character gets taken out in the early stages by a one armed cowboy armed with silly string you'll appreciate the ease in cracking hoodlum skull right from the outset.

Catwoman is also a playable character, and her missions take up about 10% of the game. She moves different from Batman, with an emphasis on her agility and quickness. It’s a fun diversion and adds a little bonus to the mix.

The biggest change from Arkham Asylum to Arkham City is the scope of the game. Whereas AA felt like a huge open world game, in reality it was a fairly linear experience with a lot of backtracking. Arkham City increases the size of the sandbox fivefold. More than that, the game is littered with side missions for players that want to squeeze every ounce they can from the game. The Riddler’s puzzles and trophy hunting are carried over from the first game, with over 440 objectives for players to compete. New additions include rescuing political prisoners from beatdowns at the hands of  hardened criminals, destroying canisters of the super-drug TITAN that are hidden throughout the city and playing a deadly game with the serial killer Victor Zasaz where you have to find and answer a ringing payphone before he slices up a hostage. You can set the main storyline aside and lose yourself in the sheer amount of options for hours on end.

Batman: Arkham City is going to win a lot of “Game of the Year” honors with good reason. It improves on the near perfect template created by the first game in every conceivable way. In the pricey word of video games it provides fanatics that need to complete 100% of the game hundreds of hours of bonus content, side missions and trophy hunting. As far as use of the Batman license goes, the folks at Rocksteady Games can stand shoulder to shoulder with Christopher Nolan’s excellent films at the top of the mountain.