The biggest change from the first game, both aesthetically and in a gameplay sense, is that there is now a fully open city to explore. From a story standpoint, this area is actually a walled off section of Gotham City, which is being used as a mega prison and is now home to your typical henchmen, political prisoners and of course, a huge selection of recognisable Batman villains that we've all grown to love... Bane, Poison Ivy, The Joker, Mr Freeze and many more make an appearance (although Egghead is still strangely omitted, which scrambles my brain in an eggstremely unpleasant manner). Now, imagine you lived in Gotham City... if someone floated the idea around that "hey guys, we're going to wall off some of the city, kick a load of people out of their homes, and then shove all of our criminals in there"... how many of you would say, "Yeah, sure, sounds a great idea!" Needless to say, the story connections are a bit loose this time round, but if you look past that, everything else is still outlandish and slightly over the top in a way we've come to expect from Batman.
The new open area would be nothing without an exciting way to get around it, and Arkham City doesn't disappoint. Batman's grappling hook, combined with opening his cape to glide make for great way of traversing the city, and it looks damned cool when you do it too. It's not perfect, you often find yourself catapulting yourself the wrong way off a building, but once you get used to it you're getting from place to place in no time.
What's disappointing is the lack of main story stuff that happens in the open world. Most of the missions take place inside, at which point it's back to the basics laid down in Arkham Asylum. Swinging around from conveniently placed ledges, waiting for guards to become isolated, and then taking them out silently. If you're discovered however, and the guards start converging on your position, all is not lost. Arkham Asylum had probably the best combat system in the business outside of straight up fighting games. Arkham City took that system, and improved it. So simple, and yet hard to master, combat is still a mixture of timing, quickly using one of Batman's many gadgets, and simply flailing your fists at guys. This time around, they've added in a critical strike system, where if you time your strikes perfectly, you'll deal more damage. You've still got your array of gadgets from the first game, with many more added here. New additions range from a freeze grenade, which will immobilise guards caught in the blast for a few seconds, to a disruptor, which can disable enemy weapons silently and from afar. This makes for extremely satisfying situations where you walk up to a guard, they try and shoot you, they look helplessly at their gun, and you proceed to beat them senseless. The animation is also still top notch, with Batman going between jumping, dodging, attacking and blocking seamlessly. The graphics are still extremely nice looking, the darkness partly mirroring the tone of the game, and the frame rate was solid for the entirety. I said it earlier, but it remains true, it just looks damned cool.
The other main feature is the ability to play as Catwoman. She has her own story missions which break up the main ones nicely, but she is just not as enjoyable to play with as the Bat himself. She only has her whip to move about the city with, making getting around much slower, and combat just feels like an inferior version of Batman. It could've been a really nice feature, but it ended up feeling a little tacked on.
The challenge rooms make a return, where you're confined to a small space, tasked with beating up waves of increasingly challenging enemies, or beating up guys with your own abilities impaired. This remains the least compelling part of the game for me, but it's there if you want it. This is the only place in the game you get to play as Robin or Nightwing though, so there's that.
Outside of the main missions, you are once again tasked with finding all of The Riddler's secrets, scattered around the world. These involve finding his trophies, solving his riddles and taking a photograph of a specific location, or entering Batman's detective mode and finding huge question marks hidden in the scenery invisible to the naked eye. There are over 400 trophies to find alone, which is a crazy amount, and it would take a lot more time than I care to give to find them all. However once you have completed everything he has set out for you, you are promised the pleasure of facing Mr. Edward Nigma himself... and I'm sure by that time, you'll be more than willing to knock the stuffing out of him.
So really, it's nothing revolutionary. Although I suppose more Batman Arkham Asylum is what we wanted, so that's what we got. I just hope that for the next game, something is changed a bit more drastically, to avoid it becoming one of those jaded, yearly releases that everyone plays, even though nothing has really changed. I'm sure Rocksteady will stop that from happening, because Batman isn't the game the industry needs...it's the game it deserves.(sorry)
Thanks for reading.
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