I loved the original Arkham Asylum game(my review). To me, it was the first game that really demonstrated what could be done with Batman. And now the developers have gone and made it bigger and better in Arkham City. They’ve left in the best parts of the game and improved a bunch of other pieces. It’s a fun, exciting game on a much bigger scale than the original game and still as much fun. Let’s check out what’s different.
One of the biggest changes in the game is that you are now in the city rather than on an island. The basic premise is that part of Gotham city was cordoned off with huge walls and is the new Arkham Asylum (City). This makes for one of the best changes in the game with simply the layout. No longer is Batman running along the ground to get to various parts of the island. Now, he is moving from roof to roof, gliding between buildings and grappling everywhere. This makes it feel even more like Batman. He’s no longer out in the open, but hiding, lurking on rooftops anywhere.
Batman also has some new toys. The best of which is smoke pellets. Batman can now go into detective mode and drop a smoke pellet. The bad guys can’t see and Batman can come out from anywhere to attack them with his vision not diminished due to the detective vision. The other fun toy is the remote controlled batarang. Batman can now throw the batarang and control where it goes along its journey. This makes for some fun challenges when you need to guide the batarang around a bunch of obstacles. There is also an electricity toy and an ice toy (courtesy of Mr. Freeze) that are needed for some challenges, but almost seem out of place in Batman’s collection of toys. And Batman’s gliding now has a power dive and a pull-up* (dive down and then pull up to be able to gather speed and go further) to add to the fun of gliding between buildings.
*It took me forever to figure this out. You have to hold “A” button to glide and then push forward on analog stick and hit “RT” to dive bomb. When you want to pull up, you have to let go of “RT” and pull the analog stick back.
One of the other great additions to the game is the side missions. In the first game, it was a pretty much linear plot. You have to do task A with Villain 1 and then do task B with Villain 2. In this game there are a bunch of side missions with Zsasz, Hush, Azrael, Deadshot, Riddler among others. The main story line involves a great cast of villains with Joker, Penguin, Solomon Grundy, Mr. Freeze and Ra’s al Ghul among the lineup. And we have a playable Catwoman with her own goals, Riddler trophies (which don’t tie into her storyline at all) and toys. It adds another level of fun to the game
The Riddler trophies and puzzles are back and better integrated into the game. As you gather the pieces and solve the puzzles, you are led on a trail to rescue Riddler hostages and finally capture Riddler as well. And, to add to the fun, rather than have maps that Batman finds, you have Batman find Riddler henchmen hidden among the thugs running around and has to interrogate them to find the locations on the map. It makes it more interesting and gives Batman yet another reason for beating up bad guys.
The storylines lead to at least two possible big bads for the next installment as Batman marks two of the side missions as things to follow up on the next day. This does a great job of laying the ground work for new storylines and makes me wonder how big they will make the next installment.
Overall, they took a great game and bad it better. Very few of the changes that were made were bad and the game is much, more enjoyable. Considering how good the original game was, this is high praise. Highly recommended for casual gamers and hard core gamers alike.