Batman: Arkham City First Impressions

Warning, Walls of text below. Proceed at your own risk.

 

So as some of you know, my 360 is dead and awaiting a new one. However that did not stop me from getting Arkham City Collectors edition sent out to me (yea yea i know). In the mean time, i high jacked my friends xbox for a whole afternoon and i am here to give you very brief impression of the next installment of this great game.

 

Simple words? Freaking awesome. To tell the truth, the only thing that was wrong with the first installment was...well...ok there wasnt anything wrong so sue me. Arkham Assylum is in my opinion what a batman game should be. Characters, enviroment, movement, story everything was superb. However Arkham City turly did outdo itself. Most continuations or sequels usually (in my opinion) build up quite poorly on their predecessor. However, this one built itself on perfection and the end result was, the nicest experience in a game i have played since my times with old school RPG's back in the 90's.

 

 

So, the premise of this title as everyone knows, takes place in the actual Arkham city. Now unlike Arkham Assylum where you have areas open up to you as you need to explore them or get new gadgets, in this title you get the whole city all to yourself from the get go. Or rather, 90% of it i would say. Seems that they merged Infamous and Arkham Assylum into one awesome game experience. I say this because like infamous you get to travel the whole city and do "mini missions" at your liesure like rescuing bystanders and stuff. Only difference is that where you rescue civilians in Infamous, you rescue er..."Political Prisoners" in Arkham.

 

Fighting system has been improved to be more fast paced than its predecessor. Even the use of gadgets has been improved. Better accessible shortcuts to the gadgets (most of which you start off with) means cooler combos from the get go. Also worthy of mention is that just like a normal city, you will find plenty of thugs and not so thuggish criminals all over the place (i say normal city because of the population factor) there are plenty of thugs everywhere for you to fight. One thing that can be said about this title, is that it has a very big emphasis on large 6+ enemies against little old you battles. Very often you will find yourself in fights against rather numerous oponents all at once.

 

 

Enemy AI has been improved exponentially. The AI, while still formidable, could be exploited once you know how it works in Arkham Assylum. However in city, it is quite easy for you to get spotted while swinging about your merry way. That lovely tactic of swinging from gargoyle to gargoyle, while still effective, is a bit harder to pull off. Enemies also have a smarter search and destroy feature that kicks in when they find one of their pals unconcious. While this did exist in Arkham Assylum, it is quite improved (they threw granades at me while i was hiding under a floor panel!). Another thing worthy of mention is the fact that thugs that know you are around become extremely paranoid and begin to "look around" corners before going into hallways that you "could" have booby trapped. This kinda prevents you from doing "corner takedowns" effectively. Final note on enemy AI is that they now behave like organized thugs and dont follow the "every man for himself" rule that Assylum had. Even when you have only 2 thugs left, they WILL stick together to the bitter end.

 

 

In conclusion, while i have not finished the game and i have only played 6 hours worth of the game and still only have like 7% of the game done (Victor Szaahs kept me busy -_- ) This is a true master piece that was not rushed and that will keep you busy for a few long hours (unlike a certain FPS). I recommend one and all to pick this up and play it until you truly believe yourself to be Batman. Sorry for the wall of text, i was bored and i had nothing better to do.