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Batman Arkham City Review

Batman Arkham City is a 2011 action-adventure video game developed by Rocksteady Studios. It is the second installment in the Batman Arkham series.

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“Nice of you to join us, Oracle“

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I really liked this game and although I thought ‘Batman Arkham Asylum’ was slightly better as a whole, I still enjoyed this second entry a lot and it is a worthy successor to a great original. Now the plot is probably better this time around. It is well crafted and rich in themes and characters. I liked it quite a bit and the series continues its streak of strong writing, solid dialogue and excellent voice performances. The acting is truly terrific here, at least for video game standards. The same goes for the dialogue and also the humor as sometimes it could be quite funny with snarky one-liners from Bats being the highlights.
But let’s talk about the gameplay. Batman Arkham City is once again an action-adventure game that relies strongly on action, but it still follows a plot and has well developed characters. It also features stealth elements which were once again the major highlights to this player. Whenever I had to take down an entire army of brutes, I was having a blast and truly some of those levels were so intriguingly constructed with excellent designs and much smarter A.I. this time around.

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I also loved the combat. Yes, Batman is probably too strong here, but that is the point as, I agree with the critics, it almost makes you feel like Batman yourself and that is the point of playing video games, especially the superhero ones. I felt like a caped crusader and I definitely felt that I had power and that I could win in every situation.
The villains are again weaker as some of the boss fights such as Freeze were quite interesting in the tactics that you had to employ and really clever when you think about them, but others like Penguin and Hugo Strange were incredibly weak and disappointing. Them not fighting at all, but just waiting behind their guards was so unfortunate.
And that brings me to my next point – the overabundance of characters. Yes, there are just too many characters in Arkham City and most especially villains that all of them did not get as much to do as they deserved. That was certainly a problem although I still liked each one of them. Joker is as great as before and I liked how Alfred was utilized in a funny manner. Penguin was good, Strange is okay but weak in the end and of course Ra’s al Ghul is a memorable character and those levels were some of the most creative of the entire game. I also really liked the side quests with Catwoman who possessed some pretty interesting combat moves.

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Batman Arkham City features a solid score, good direction and it is pretty well paced. I loved almost all of the levels, fights and especially the designs of the stealth levels which were frequently even brilliant. All of the newly added gadgets were beautifully utilized and they helped add a lot of refreshing gameplay abilites to the game. Te world building is strong and crusing Arkham City was certainly a lot of fun. I like that it has side quests and that you can play it after you have finished the main story, but that main campaign still remains incredibly short and that was frustating.

In the end, I really liked Batman Arkham City despite it being filled with too many characters and being short in length. But those characters are well developed, the game is visually terrific, the plot is good and the gameplay is once again fantastic as it makes you think at times with its clever level designs plus being in Batman’s shoes was just a lot of fun from start to finish.